Spain under pressure to impose virus lockdown
05 November, 2020
With coronavirus infections rising, Spain's central government was under great pressure Wednesday to check out the exemplory case of other European nations and impose a new national shutdown.
The country gets the second-highest caseload in europe after France. It has recorded a lot more than 1.2 million cases up to now and 36,495 deaths, including 18,669 new infections and 238 new deaths reported by medical ministry on Tuesday.
More worryingly, pressure on hospitals is increasing with nearly a third of most hospital intensive care unit beds, 29 percent, occupied by Covid-19 patients.
Austria, Britain, France, Germany and Ireland have all recently re-imposed shutdowns as the virus that first emerged in China towards the end of 2019 shows no sign of abating.
But as yet, Spain has resisted, with the government hoping a national night-time curfew and other restrictions set up by its regional authorities who are responsible for managing the pandemic, will be enough to slow the rate of infection.
The regions of Galicia and Murcia on Wednesday ordered all bars and restaurants to close, a day following the northern Castilla y Leon region took the same step, while demanding tougher action from the government.
Regional leader Alfonso Fernandez Manueco urged the government to "take responsibility" and "declare the measures which the situation requires" -- namely a fresh lockdown.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declared a state of emergency on October 25 that has given Spain's powerful regional governments the legal tools to order a shutdown of businesses and impose nighttime curfews to fight the virus.
However they cannot impose home confinement without permission from the central government, which includes so far resisted the move.
"We are going to do not reach that point," Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo told Canal Sur radio on Tuesday when asked about the opportunity of a fresh lockdown.
The federal government was still waiting to start to see the results of "the measures taken as yet" including the nighttime curfew, she added.
"Give us somewhat of time," Calvo said.
Health Minister Salvador Illa has said the federal government was "neither working on nor expecting" to announce a stay-at-home order.
"We think the wide range of measures open to regional authorities is enough," he said on Monday after rejecting another request from the northern Asturias region for permission to impose home confinement.
In mid-March, when the pandemic first struck, Spain imposed among the world's strictest lockdowns, which crippled its economy and left everyone traumatised.
Fernando Garcia, an epidemiologist at the Carlos III Health Institute, said the chance level was "very high" and that Spain should follow the exemplory case of other European nations and impose a lockdown "for at least two weeks".
"In this situation, more drastic measures are needed than those that we now have, which are extremely timid and plainly insufficient," he told AFP.
But Fernando Rodriguez Artalejo, a public health professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, said it had been unclear what the "added benefit" of home confinement would be, considering that bars, restaurants and nightclubs are already closed or operating at reduced capacity across a lot of Spain.
"Possibly the most prudent course is always to wait and see what effect the measures which are being taken now are experiencing, which are many and incredibly restrictive," he told AFP.
Infections started out rising after lockdown measures were fully removed on June 21, with the increase blamed on the rapid return of nightlife and having less an efficient track-and-trace system for infectious cases.
Messy disagreements between the central and regional governments over what measures to take also have hampered the response, specialists say.
Source: japantoday.com