After a day of chaotic information releases and having succeeded in upsetting their Spanish government partners, the opposition parties, the autonomous communities, and putting in serious jeopardy the latest extension of the state of alarm which has to be passed by the Congress, at 8 o'clock at night Pedro Sánchez and his health minister, Salvador Illa, made a change to the latest outrageous idea announced by the Spanish executive that morning: that children under 14 could only leave home with their parents to go to the supermarket, the bank or the pharmacy.
It doesn't take a great deal of reflection to realize that the Spanish government had made the worst possible decision, as it allowed children to go to enclosed centres where the chances of contamination would be much higher and on the other hand they were forbidden to go for walks in the fresh air close to home. To send children to the place which the WHO explicitly stated was best to avoid, as a possible focus of contagion, was such a ridiculous idea that it could only have been surpassed if, for example, the plan had allowed them to visit hospitals. The workers in all shopping centres and all those giving direct attention to the public in their jobs, who are on the coalface of the fight against the pandemic, at great personal sacrifice and often in precarious conditions, did not deserve this nonsense from the Spanish executive.
There is an almost unhealthy obsession in the Spanish government with distancing itself as much as possible from the decisions adopted by the Catalan government. It is enough for a proposal to be made from Barcelona for the Sánchez executive to defend the opposite, and in Tuesday's particular case there is a lot of this, thinking that the political yield can always trump the decisions of technicians who are just there to put their experience at the service of governments. It is true that the Catalan government has its own proposal for the lifting of lockdown which, like all things, will be opinionable and debatable. In fact, as an example, in one of the drafts prepared by the team led by Oriol Mitjà which appeared on Sunday, the option of an immunity passport (linked to a digital certificate) was included, which president Torra's team adpoted as its own and which, as further hours went by, ended up being removed from the text.
But there were others that were fully valid, such as that of time slots in which children would be able to go for walks and the release of lockdown by territories, which were much more thought through than the permanent improvisation of the Spanish government. And when there is no improvisation there is the single command, as any excuse is good for the Catalan government to have no room to carry out its own policy. So much so that the territorialization of the lifting of lockdown will be decided in Madrid so that it will not be Catalonia or the Basque Country that in the end apply the measures decided to its own citizens. It may be necessary to start making the point that the PP would not have dared to trying anything more extreme. In any case, they are the same.