Spain Declares New State of Emergency to Last Until May 2021

Today, the Spanish government declared a national state of emergency amid the latest, still-worsening resurgence of COVID-19 infection in Europe. The order includes an overnight curfew that prohibits free movement on Spain’s streets between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., with allowances for work commutes, purchasing medicines and providing care for elderly and young family members.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that the curfew takes effect tonight, Oct. 25, and will likely remain in place for six months, in an effort to avoid repeating near-collapse of the country’s hospital system under the weight of new cases. Health officials have been clamping down on partying and nightlife, seeing it as a major source of this latest recurrence of sizeable viral spread.

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The curfew order does not apply to the Canary Islands, Spain’s territory that retains the most favorable COVID-19 figures, and which was therefore recently removed from Britain’s and Germany’s lists of unsafe travel destinations.

Officials in Spain’s 17 regions and two autonomous cities are granted the authority to modify the hours of the new curfew—starting somewhere between 10:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., and ending between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m.—as well as decide whether to close regional borders to travel and cap social gatherings at six people residing in different households.

In a nationwide address that followed a meeting with his Cabinet, Sánchez said, “The reality is that Europe and Spain are immersed in a second wave of the pandemic,” reported AP News. “The situation we are living in is extreme.” The Prime Minister said that he’ll request Parliament’s lower house to approve extending the state of emergency through May 2021.

This, Spain’s second nationwide state of emergency since the pandemic started, isn’t as restrictive as the order Sánchez issued in March that mandated home confinement for its 47 million inhabitants over six weeks and shut down the country’s borders. Authorities want to avoid another such complete shutdown, the economic toll of which sent Spain into a recession and saw hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.

“There is no home confinement in this state of emergency, but the more we stay at home, the safer we will be. Everyone knows what they have to do,” Sánchez said. “The loss of life must be as low as possible, but we also must protect our economy.”

This past week, Spain became the first country in Europe to surpass one million officially recorded COVID-19 cases, although Sánchez revealed in a nationally televised address that the true numbers could exceed three million. Such a discrepancy could be attributed to gaps in testing, among other factors that would affect the true case count.