Even more pain in Spain
Lockdown tightened as it tops China in number of cases
MADRID — Spain enforced even tighter stay-at-home rules Monday for its 47 million people, as the country overtook China as the nation with the third-highest number of reported infections in the world, after the United States and Italy.
But the new measures, which confused many Spaniards, came under attack from business leaders who say the government is hurting the economy beyond repair, and opposition parties who accuse it of improvising in its response to the outbreak.
Already stretched beyond breaking point in at least onethird of the country, hospitals are seeing scores of medical workers falling ill and requiring quarantine, while the arrival of protective gear is suffering delays.
The government’s decision to impose a two-week halt effective Monday to all nonessential economic activity came even as authorities claimed that the previous two weeks of confinement were starting to pay off with a slower pace of the pandemic’s expansion.
The president of Spain’s main business association, CEOE, warned that the stricter measures would create “a very grave economic problem that can lead to a social problem” through potential job and income losses.
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards have already applied for unemployment subsidies since the confinement measures began in mid-March, and a $220 billion aid package, much of it from public funds, has been rolled out to help workers and companies cushion the drop in production.
“If you stop the country, we’ll have a huge social problem within five months,” Antonio Garamendi told Spain’s public broadcaster, TVE.
Only workers in hospitals, pharmacies, the food supply chain and other essential industries are required to work until the end of Easter, in mid-April. In a call for Spaniards to “hibernate,” as described by a cabinet member of Spain’s left-wing coalition government, the rest were asked to scale back operations to weekend-level.
But the new measures surprised and confused many Spaniards, who woke up on Monday not knowing whether their jobs were part of the exceptions to the government’s new emergency decree that wasn’t fully published until midnight on Sunday.
“Spaniards don’t deserve more lies, incompetence and internal fighting,” opposition conservative Popular Party leader Pablo Casado said on Monday.
In hard-hit Madrid, which has seen nearly half of the country’s deaths, flags flew at halfstaff for an official mourning period that began Monday. During a minute of silence observed for the dead, bells tolled across the Spanish capital’s empty Puerta del Sol central square. Speakers blasted American composer Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”