The first full day of new coronavirus restrictions in Madrid looked like business as usual for the city’s famed Gran Vía shopping avenue.
But with the advent of a 50% capacity limit on shops, bars and restaurants, a familiar sight had returned on a chilly Saturday afternoon. Reminiscent of a few months ago when Spain was just emerging from a strict lockdown, a line of shoppers snaked outside retailer Zara and an even bigger one stretched down the street in front of Primark.
And even though masks are worn everywhere, all the time now, that 1.5 meter social-distancing measure appears long gone, at a time when Madrid seems to need it most of all.
One has to wonder if this is what warring Spanish politicians had in mind with new rules that kicked in last Friday evening, as the more than 6 million residents of the Madrid region find themselves once again at the epicenter of Europe’s second big coronavirus outbreak.
According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Spain’s 14-day cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 stands at 319.3. Only the Czech Republic is a close second. But it isn’t like scientists, doctors and residents aren’t screaming “Do something!”
While cases climb, but thankfully causing fewer deaths this time, Madrid’s right-wing premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso has been fighting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s leftist coalition government on how to control the virus. On Sunday, a group of 55 Spanish scientific organizations representing 170,000 health professionals published a manifesto in every newspaper, demanding that they stop and focus on the crisis.
“In the name of more than 47 million Spaniards, yourselves and your families included, you must change now so much political, professional and human inconsistency,” said the manifesto, which has gained over 31,000 signatures on Change.org
Other measures now being enacted include limiting gatherings indoor and outdoor to six people and shutting businesses at 10 p.m., with bars and restaurants closing at 11 p.m. Ayuso has argued the measures will ruin an already devastated economy.
What a weary Madrid population wants to know is will any of this be enough. According to one prominent virologist and immunologist who spoke to MarketWatch last week before the measures kicked in, far more must be done.
Margarita del Val heads up a cross-disciplinary initiative by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) — Salud Global/Global Health. She has been urging the entire region be restricted — 45 municipalities had been before the latest moves, which led to accusations of punishing the poor due to the locations of the most heavily affected areas.
Del Val said Madrid needs better quarantine control and contact tracing, and that it lacks the health-care officials to do this. The government recently announced that police would be able to access health department data to help enforce quarantines on individuals, while the Spanish army was drafted in August to help with contact tracing in parts of the country.
Del Val also zeroed in on heavily congested public transport — social media is filled with complaints about crowded buses and trains, specifically in areas that are seeing sharp rises in cases.
I read somewhere not to long ago that mask wearing would be mandated for years after the killer vaccine(s) are administered. It was either Gov. Cuomo or Mayor DeBlasio of New York who stated recently that the lockdown would continue until there were ZERO cases of covid 19. That tells me that there may be no end in site for the covid 19 madness until one is dead and buried. I didn’t expect our state and local leaders to free us from mask wearing at the start of cold and flu season, when mask mandates were in place all summer.… Read more »
Once again CASES, always cases not actually sick ot dying people, and all done by a test that the Rothschilds had made back in 2015 for Covid-19… wow what it is to have so much wealth to be able to see into the future,UNFORTUNATELY this test does NOT test for anything like a single so called Virus ,that as yet has NOT been identified or isolated, but just tests ,depending on how much they enlarge the corruption of cells and proteins ,which every human does in detoxing their old cells,whilst renewing new ones, its called life , So no wonder… Read more »