The French and Spanish governments on Tuesday announced plans to begin to relax their countries’ coronavirus lockdowns.
Edouard Philippe, prime minister of France, said the move was necessary in order to avert the risk of economic “collapse”.
Businesses in France could reopen from May 11, except cafés, restaurants and large meeting places such as big museums and cinemas, although teleworking should be continued wherever possible for at least the first three weeks, he said.
Local public transport will be largely restored, with the Paris metro and buses set to run at 70 per cent of normal capacity, although the plan is to avoid rush-hour crowding by encouraging companies to stagger working hours. Passengers will be required to wear face masks. Long-distance travel will remain restricted to those on urgent professional or family business.
Schools will reopen progressively, starting with nursery and primary schools and with attendance depending on agreement from parents, and class sizes will be limited to 15.
However, the ending of the lockdown would vary from place to place, Mr Philippe said. Departments would be labelled “red” or “green” on May 7 for the proposed easing of restrictions four days later depending on the local number of new cases as well as on the capacity for testing and receiving patients in hospital.
Mr Philippe said beaches would remain closed until June 1 and that the 2019-20 professional football season would not resume.
“We must protect the French without immobilising the country to the point where it collapses,” he told the National Assembly in Paris.
The easing of the lockdown depended on a triple strategy of “protection, testing and isolation”, Mr Philippe said.
France has struggled to provide enough masks for its health workers and for the general population, a problem the prime minister admitted had aroused “incomprehension and anger” among the French.
But the prime minister said the government was now procuring 100m surgical masks a week for health workers, and promised that there would be enough basic, washable masks for the general population by May 11.
Tests for the virus were also in short supply at the start of the crisis in France, but the government said the aim was to have the capacity to perform 700,000 tests a week by May 11, to ensure that infected people and their contacts could be identified and then quarantined.
Spain also hopes to phase out its coronavirus lockdown — one of the world’s toughest — over the next two months, Pedro Sánchez, prime minister, announced in an address to the nation on Tuesday night. The shift towards a “new normality” would take place over four stages, which in the best case will be completed by the end of June and will vary by province by province, he said. Apart from exceptional cases, schools will not return until September.
“We are looking at a horizon of a minimum of six weeks, and, we hope, a maximum of eight,” Mr Sánchez said. Progress towards the new normality would be determined by epidemiological, transport and socio-economic data, and the capacity of the Spanish healthcare system, in terms of primary care and intensive care beds, he said.
Speaking after a marathon cabinet meeting, Mr Sánchez said that after a preparatory stage in which restaurants would be able to open for takeaway service, mainland Spain would enter the first phase proper of the transition on May 11. Then restaurants would be allowed to open outside terraces, as long as no more than 30 per cent of places are occupied, and hotels to resume business, again subject to a maximum 30 per cent occupancy.
Smaller shops would be able to open for appointment, under strict hygiene conditions, but commercial centres would not. Places of worship will also be allowed to open in the first phase, as long as they fill no more than a third of their seats.
Mr Sánchez said that during the transition people would not be allowed to travel between different provinces and even after the arrival of the “new normality” it would be highly recommended to wear masks on public transport.
Under the second phase outlined by Mr Sánchez, restaurants will be able to open up to a third of the seats in their indoor dining areas, with cinemas, theatres and exhibitions also able to sell up to a third of their capacity. The third phase would relax such criteria, but insist on continued social distancing of about two metres, and the fourth phase would be the “new normality”.
In neighbouring Portugal, president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa announced the country’s state of emergency would end on May 3. But he warned that the “end of the state of emergency does not mean the virus has stopped spreading, or that we no longer need confinement measures”.
In Greece, prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address that restrictions on movement in towns and cities will be lifted from May 4, when bookshops, electronics and sports equipment stores and hairdressing salons will reopen. Most other retailers will resume trading on May 11. Parks and archaeological sites will open on May 18.
Additional reporting by Peter Wise in Lisbon and Kerin Hope in Athens
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April 29, 2020 at 12:49AM
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