“Yes, it may happen that in the coming autumns and winters it will be necessary to adapt measures. Some years will be more restrictive, others less”, admitted Graça Freitas.

The head of the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) considered that such behaviours will not be difficult for the Portuguese to adopt, underlining: “The human being has a great ability to adapt and this will be another factor that appears in our lives and we will learn deal with it almost instinctively.”

“We will reach a time when recommendations will almost not be needed and that is what is expected, that the population, services, society will adapt, making measures more flexible, but in a way that these measures impact as little as possible on our social and economic life”, she said, stressing: “There is no way out of this until we understand the characteristics of the virus, and it is a very young virus”.

She gave as an example the flu virus, which even though it is known and a virus that the Portuguese are already used to, "in some winters it causes greater pressure on health services and emergencies".

“We have no forecast of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus will behave and there is no guarantee that the new variants will be more benign than the previous ones, they may even be more complex,” she said.