Spain lockdown extended despite virus being ‘close to passing peak’
Emergency measures to go on into May amid local objections as death rates show signs of decreasing
SPAIN’S draconian lockdown will continue into May despite hopes that it has reached its coronavirus peak as the rate of deaths begins to slow.
Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, said he would request an extension of the state of emergency until April 26 as he warned that restrictions to combat Covid-19 contagion would need to go on for longer. However, as the number of deaths fell for the second day in a row, he added in a televised address that Spain was “close to passing the peak of infections”.
Spain is halfway through its third week of emergency lockdown measures, with some signs emerging that the spread of the virus is slowing.
“The lockdown is saving lives,” the prime minister said in his broadcast.
The health ministry reported that 809 people succumbed to Covid-19 yesterday, taking the total number of fatalities since the crisis began to 11,744. But the rate of new cases is slowing, up 7,000 on the previous day to 124,736.
“Once we have got past the peak and started to turn the corner, we must get ready to de-escalate, which will be in the form of a transition back to our daily lives,” Mr Sánchez said.
His Left-wing ruling coalition will lift the ban on all but essential workers travelling to their jobs, allowing factories and construction to resume.
But it appears that families will have to stay indoors without exception for a further three weeks.
There are growing calls for the rules to be relaxed to allow children go outside once a day, a change Italy’s government has agreed to in the past week.
Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, has demanded that children be allowed outside for a period each day as the lockdown is affecting their mental health, leading to “sleep disorders, sadness and anxiety”.
There is also growing dissent against the stringent rules that prevent relatives from being able to visit loved ones who are sick and dying in hospitals and care homes.
The regional health department of Castilla y León has rebelled against the national order, and said it will allow one person to visit any patient considered at risk of dying.
Increasing evidence suggests that thousands of Spaniards are dying of Covid-19 without being diagnosed, meaning that the real death toll from the virus is considerably higher than the official figure. The government has ordered that post-mortem examinaitons should only be carried after deaths caused by violence in a move aimed to save medical resources.
In the Madrid region, some 3,000 of the capital’s 52,000 care home residents died in March, triple the number that would normally be expected to be lost in the month. Authorities in towns and cities around Spain also point to extraordinarily high rates of death that go far beyond official numbers.
“The average number of deaths in the province in March is barely 90, but this year, there have been 250, and that is not even the final figure. Of those, only 30 were diagnosed with Covid-19,” said Carlos Martínez, the mayor of the municipality of Soria.
From within Spain’s only fully quarantined area, Marc Castells, the mayor of Igualada, told The Sunday Telegraph he had seen an unusually high death rate among the population of 70,000.
“We have had 140 deaths in March, compared to an average of 46 over the past five years,” he said.
“The health department has confirmed 40 deaths from Covid-19. It does not add up, and common sense tells us that the other 50 or so did not die for the sake of it.”
Meanwhile, there were signs of optimism in Italy, which saw its first drop yesterday in the number of patients receiving intensive care treatment for the coronavirus.