With 27,651 infections recorded in the last 24 hours by the Directorate-General for Health (DGS), the country has now recorded 3,025,421 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection since the first positive diagnoses were confirmed, on March 2, 2019.

Of these approximately three million cases of infection, more than 2.2 million were registered in the regions of Lisbon and Vale do Tejo (1,078,220) and the North (1,165,803), according to DGS data.

2,388,235 people have already recovered from the infection and 20,401 have died from covid-19, which means that Portugal currently has 616,785 people with active infection.

It took about 17 months for Portugal to exceed the mark of one million positive cases, which happened on August 14, 2021, but the pace of contagions has increased significantly since the beginning of this year.

The country only needed about five months to go from one to two million infected people, a mark that was reached on January 19, with the Omicron variant, considered by experts more transmissible than Delta, to be responsible for a significant part of infections.

From January 19 until today - in just 22 days -, Portugal has again had another million cases of infection with the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, surpassing the barrier of 60,000 daily cases on three days (26, 27 and January 28).

The Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) pandemic monitoring group estimated that, due to the number of people who have already been infected and those who are vaccinated against Covid-19, “after the end of February, the entire population will have some immunity to the virus.”