"In addition to combating the covid-19 pandemic in terms of health, there is another struggle, which is the struggle for economic and social recovery. The damage is enormous: Many thousands of jobs lost, companies that have closed, earnings that have declined and an increase in effective poverty", he said.

Earlier, the Prime Minister had mentioned that, between 2015 and 2019, about 500,000 citizens "overcame" poverty in Portugal.

"But many of these 500,000 people who had come out of poverty, unfortunately, when we have the numbers for 2020 in a year, we will see that, surely, the values ​​of poverty have increased very significantly," he assumed.

However, António Costa spoke of "an effort to start over and recover, with the advantage that the country has already tested policies that have given good results and, therefore, if they are maintained, they will return to results".

"Fortunately, we now have added muscle that we did not have in 2015. Therefore, we can reach this point of recovery more quickly", maintained the prime minister.

At this point, he repeated the message that, for the Government, "it is not enough to put the country back in the situation it was in 2019".

"After reaching the point where we were in 2019, we need to make up for the time we lost until 2022. We have to get there ahead of time and better," he added, in an allusion to the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR).