Date Published: 30/10/2020
ARCHIVED - Castilla y León and Catalunya raise the topic of a total lockdown
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
Regional governments are forced to contemplate “the last resort” if the numbers do not improve soon
The second wave of coronavirus contagion has now led almost all of the 17 regions of Spain to ban people from travelling from one Autonomous Community to another, and in anticipation of a possible further worsening of the situation some regional governments are already beginning to lay the groundwork for even stricter lockdown restrictions.
On Thursday the government of Castilla y León made a request for a legal framework to be established in order to allow regional governments to re-introduce rules to keep people inside their homes if the epidemiological data fail to improve over the next two weeks, although for the time being at least they hope to stop short of the near-total lockdown imposed in March of this year. Regional Health minister Verónica Casado explains that government experts are weighing up the possibility of introducing a “programmed home confinement” scheme, adding that the region is currently at “extreme risk”.
Similar schemes are already being implemented in parts of France and Germany, although schools and education are not being allowed to grind to a halt and when businesses are closed down the closures are implemented in ordered sectors. The aim of this gradual scale of restrictions is to avoid the total lockdown which was imposed in March while at the same time providing enough breathing space to prevent hospitals from becoming completely overwhelmed.
The Castilian government stressed that for the time being the intention is merely to make sure that such measures are legally possible if they become necessary, but already the regional government of Catalunya has made it clear that the option of confining people to their homes cannot be ruled out. The region’s Health secretary, Marc Ramentol, reported in a television interview that although the rate of infection in Catalunya has slowed a little, the impact on the health service has not been lessened, and the first aim is to reduce the number of new cases reported daily from its current level of 5,500 to 1,800.
Sr Ramentol also made it clear that confining people to their homes must always be “the last resort”, but added that if it becomes clear that the current measures are not enough to halt the spread of the pandemic it will be necessary to give it serious consideration.
The minister reports that had the current measures not been implemented there would probably be 10,000 new cases a day in Catalunya by now, and that in this sense they can be said to have been successful, but at the same time he describes the current level of 5,500 as “unsustainable” in terms of being able to provide adequate health care. The curve may have been flattened, he says, but now it must be forced downward, and no de-escalation of restrictions can be considered until there is breathing space for the health service.
Among experts in Public Health and among professionals who work directly in hospitals, there is consensus that the restrictions imposed so far have not been sufficient, and there are also many doubts that the new measures announced, such as the perimeter confinement of the autonomous communities and the curfew, will be able to bend the epidemic curve in time to avoid disaster.
Yesterday the Emergency coordinator for the Spanish Health Service, Fernando Simón, warned as he presented the highest number of new cases for a single day in the pandemic so far : "For now, we do not see the need for confinement, but there are fewer and fewer measures left to us to to implement, and we are not ruling out anything at the moment."