Date Published: 27/07/2020
ARCHIVED - Lorca takes extraordinary measures as Covid cases rise to 16 in just a few hours
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
The council has closed parks, sporting facilities, youth and centres for the elderly and suspended all cultural and sporting activities
Lorca Council has announced a series of extraordinary measures as a sudden rise of new cases is detected in the municipality on Monday morning.
Mayor, Diego José Mateos, said that until the early hours of this morning, only one case had been confirmed, apparently linked to a evening leisure venue in the city, and that this, in turn, was linked to the Totana outbreak.
Last week Totana was confined following an outbreak in a bar and now has 108 cases confirmed, all relating to the same bar.
He added that the other cases are being followed up to see if they are linked or independent, but acknowledged that "between Lorca and Totana there is a lot of proximity and there is a lot of worker intercharge".
By that he means that the municipality of Lorca has a large pool of agricultural labourers, mainly immigrant workers, who live in the municipality but work in other areas of both Murcia and the neighbouring Almería province of the Andalucía region as demanded seasonally.
More than two thirds of the cases in the region are within the Latin-American community.
The regional government has a pool of contact tracers working to try and identify close contacts of those who are testing positive in a bid to try and stem the major outbreaks and identify potential areas into which the virus may have spread and will be talking to all of the new positives to try and ascertain if there is a link between them.
Lorca council has decided to suspend all scheduled public sporting and cultural events, close parks and gardens, social centres for young and the elderly, all sporting facilities, close off the sporting equipment provided in the open-air for the elderly in public streets, close the Casa de la Oenegés, and reinforce the extraordinary disinfection of "the most sensitive areas" of the municipality.
The Mayor asked the population to "be aware that the virus has not gone" and appealed to the responsibility of citizens to take extra measures because "we cannot have a policeman on every street or in every square" . He assured that "if there are important decisions to be made in specific sectors or in specific spaces, we will take them according to our competence."
The regional government has established a 72 hour period in which to try and identify the source of the sudden surge in cases and evaluate whether further restrictive measures are required to stem the further spread of the virus.
He reassured residents that the full resources of the council were at the disposition of the regional government and that the council would not hesitate to undertake whatever measures were necessary to protect the health and wellbeing of its residents.
Mazarrón and several outlying districts of the Murcia City municipality, particularly Beniaján, have also reported a similar surge in cases.
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