The international pandemic of Covid-19 and the state of emergency in Portugal: Addressing the effects of lockdown

Abstract

The SARS-Cov2 pandemic is the first of this century and also of this new millennium. Several authors say that the repetition of similar situations in the future will be almost inevitable. It is therefore important to study its effects and the measures adopted in the current context in order to be able to measure the impact of the decisions adopted and enhance the positive effects of the future reaction to a new pandemic. We will begin by shaping the legal-constitutional framework of the state of emergency in our country in the first wave of the pandemic. Then we will present the restrictions imposed and the legal measures adopted by the Government in order to prevent the ballast of social contamination, trying to balance the protection of public health and economic openness.This work is restricted to the legal analysis of the main measures adopted during the state of emergency and the impact in legal terms that those measures have caused, evaluating the response that the existing legal instruments allowed during the confinement imposed on citizens, namely the teleworking regime or the electronic forms of conflict resolution in the consumer area.