When virus rules for locals, tourists differ
In Spain, residents stay put while visitors face fewer restrictions.
Oscar Robles Alvarez yearned to celebrate Easter this year with his family in his hometown in northeastern Spain, which he has not visited since Christmas 2019. Instead, he will spend the holiday Sunday in Madrid, where he now lives, because of domestic travel restrictions imposed to stem another wave of Covid-19. He said he understands why the government recently extended those rules, but he cannot fathom why no such travel ban applies to foreign tourists visiting his hometown, Getxo, a beach resort popular with surfers 128 kilometres from the border with France.
“This situation is completely unfair,” said Mr Robles Alvarez, 50, who worked in finance but is currently jobless. “Citizens are being asked to behave responsibly by politicians who themselves decide completely incoherent Covid rules.”
In the prelude to Easter, a debate in Spain about whether double standards are being applied to contain Covid-19 has been intensifying. The polemic is echoed in other European countries, where authorities have also restricted internal travel while allowing their citizens to go abroad and permitting foreign tourists to enter and move about more freely.
The back-and-forth over the rules reflects the difficult balancing acts for European governments trying to blunt the pandemic while keeping their economies afloat, particularly when it comes to the tourism revenues that are so critical to countries like Italy and Spain. After seven years of consecutive growth in tourism arrivals, Spain welcomed 19 million people last year, down from almost 84 million in 2019.
The Spanish government has defended its approach, stressing that visitors from most other countries do not present the same health risks as residents on the move because they must test negative for Covid-19 before travelling. But local residents do not have the option to move around the country, even if they have tested negative, for leisure.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, introduced plans recently to create a digital certificate that could ease tourism this summer, including internal travel within member states.
“Given that transmission and risk are similar for national and cross-border journeys, member states should ensure there is coherence between the measures applied to the two types of journey,” said Christian Wigand, a commission spokesman.
Opposition politicians in Spain seized on those comments. Some were already accusing authorities of favouring tourists over residents seeking an Easter getaway.
Maria Jesus Montero, a minister and spokesman for the Spanish government, said last week that the country was doing exactly the same as others in allowing foreign travel but limiting domestic movement.
On Tuesday, the Spanish government ordered the mandatory wearing of face masks in all public outdoor spaces, including beaches. Some regional leaders immediately criticised the rule, arguing that they should have first been consulted by the central government.
Italy also has tough rules in place restricting movement across the country. Residents are allowed to leave their town — or their house in the more affected regions — only for work, health reasons or other reasons deemed necessities.
But the government has allowed Italians to travel for tourism to most European countries, including France, Germany and Spain, only asking them to get a negative test 48 hours before their return.
A spokesman for Italy’s health minister said the risk of contagion from international travel with restrictions was lower than that of allowing free movement between domestic regions. One reason for that, he said, is volume — it is easier and cheaper for large numbers of people to travel domestically — adding that it would also be virtually impossible to enforce quarantines on travel between regions.
The Italian hotel association, Federalberghi, was among those accusing the government of double standards.
“Hotels and all the Italian hospitality system have been stuck for months because of the ban on moving from one region to another,” Bernabo Bocca, president of Federalberghi, said. “We do not understand how it is possible to authorise travel across the border and ban it within Italy.”
On Tuesday, amid reports of a boom in Easter travel bookings by Italians to places like the Canary Islands of Spain, Italy changed its rules on international travel. People flying to Italy from another European country will now have to stay in quarantine for five days and then show another negative swab test.
While the principle of the freedom of movement between member states is a cornerstone of the European Union, the bloc has struggled not only to keep internal borders open since last spring but also to harmonise its travel restrictions. Instead, individual member states have repeatedly changed their travel rules while also enforcing different methods to test or quarantine travellers.
The inconsistent travel restrictions have also baffled some prominent health experts. Fernando Simon, director of Spain’s national health emergency center, told a news conference in March that the country’s travel rules were incongruous and hard to explain.
Not helping matters, the European Union has also struggled with its vaccine rollout; Spain and Italy have both inoculated only about 11% of their populations. In comparison, Britain has given shots to 46% and the United States 29%, according to data from The New York Times.
Spain is not alone in struggling to sell citizens on travel and holiday rules. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel apologised last week after she dropped an unpopular plan to extend a shutdown over the Easter vacation.
Her U-turn came shortly after Germany lifted a quarantine for people returning from some parts of Europe where the Covid-19 caseload has fallen, including the Balearic archipelago, a major Spanish tourism destination that includes the islands of Majorca and Ibiza.
After the decision, airlines added hundreds of Easter holiday flights between Germany and Spain.