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The Spanish government has declared a new state of national emergency that includes a night curfew aimed at preventing a repeat of the near collapse of the country’s hospitals.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that the decision to restrict free movement on the streets of Spain between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. allows exceptions to go to work, buy medicine, and care for older and younger family members. .
He said the curfew goes into effect Sunday night and will likely remain in effect for six months.
“The reality is that Europe and Spain are immersed in a second wave of the pandemic,” Sánchez said during a national speech after meeting with his cabinet.
“The situation we live in is extreme.”
The leaders of the 17 regions of Spain and two autonomous cities will have the authority to set different hours for the curfew, provided they are stricter; closing regional borders for travel and limiting meetings to six people who do not live together, the prime minister said.
The curfew does not apply to the Canary Islands.
With a curfew on the mainland, Spain is following the example of neighboring France, where the government ordered a curfew from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am for major cities and large swaths of the country this week.
Health officials have pointed to nightlife as one of the main sources of the latest recurrence of infections.
Sánchez said that this week he will ask the lower house of Parliament to extend the state of emergency until May.
As dictated by the constitution, a state of emergency cannot last more than two weeks without the support of the Congress of Deputies.
Spain’s second national emergency from the pandemic is not as restrictive as the mandatory home confinement Sánchez ordered in March and lasted for six weeks before gradually being relaxed as the number of new confirmed cases declined.
“There is no home confinement in this state of emergency, but the longer we stay home, the safer we will be,” he said.
“Everyone knows what they have to do.”
The authorities want to avoid a second complete shutdown of the country of 47 million to avoid dealing another blow to the economy.
But with the infection rate picking up steam since it began to rise again in August, health experts have called for action at the national level, arguing that the crisis requires more than a patchwork of regional measures.
Several regional leaders, who run Spain’s decentralized health system, had in recent days called for the national government to declare a state of national emergency.
The state of emergency makes it easy for authorities to take swift action without having to get many types of public health restrictions approved by a judge.
Some judges have rejected efforts to limit the movements of people in certain regions, which has caused confusion among the population.
Spain this week became the first European country to exceed one million officially registered Covid-19 cases.
But Sánchez admitted in a nationally televised speech on Friday that the true number could be more than three million due to test gaps and other factors.
Spain reported nearly 20,000 new daily cases and 231 more deaths on Friday, bringing the death toll in the pandemic to 34,752.
Confirmed cases are increasing in the peninsula, the Balearic Islands and the two African enclaves of Spain.
Under the first state of emergency, Spanish military battalions were deployed to disinfect nursing homes and establish field hospitals.
Until now, this has not been necessary, as Spain’s nursing homes are better prepared and its hospitals have a slower but steady increase in cases.
“The loss of life must be as low as possible, but we must also protect our economy,” Sánchez said.
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