The Catalan president, Quim Torra, appeared on television this Friday to announce that his government had decided to apply a lockdown to Catalonia in response to the coronavirus. It is a drastic decision, undoubtedly, which the president justified in order to prevent the collapse of the Catalan healthcare system in the face of an exceptional emergency and at a time when the spread of the virus still allows for better control than has been achieved so far. It is not an easy decision to apply in the current regional context and if it is to be fully put into force, it needs the cooperation of Pedro Sánchez's Spanish government, which has competencies over airports, trains and ports.
Torra has already announced that Catalonia's police forces are ready for a response of this magnitude, in a situation that has some similarity with the terrorist attacks of 17th August 2017, when the Mossos d'Esquadra confronted the terrible attacks of that day in Barcelona and Cambrils, acting alone. It is logical, therefore, that Torra would address himself to Sánchez privately and publicly, requesting his support to carry this through, and it would be inexplicable that, due to a question of competencies, the prime minister would not agree to consider the general interest of Catalan society as expressed through its government.
The Catalan executive's decision was adopted after a day when the reluctance of the Spanish government to implement drastic decisions became clamorous. It is no longer a novelty to say that the Sánchez administration has handled this crisis with extreme slowness and with an apparent skepticism that such a situation could arise in Spain. How can it be possible that so many people are being put at risk because of a stubborn refusal to close Madrid off? This is the big unanswered question in Spain for now - though we can all imagine it - in the face of the shocking evolution of the coronavirus contagion growth curve. Just as we arrive at the fifteenth day since the beginning of the contagion, the count shows that the numbers in Spain are already clearly higher than those of Italy if the two are compared in terms of days elapsed. On the fifteenth day, the number of people affected in Italy was 3,851 and in Spain on the same day it is 4,231, and that is despite the fact that the Italian population is more than 60.48 million compared to the 46.66 million in Spain.
If Torra announced the Catalonia lockdown at night, Sanchez proposed, at midday, a deferred state of alarm - from Monday on - in which he did not specify any of the measures he intended to take and postponed any specfics until 24 hours later with their implementation due next Monday. Meanwhile, the highways from Madrid to the Mediterranean coast were dense with traffic, in an act of grave irresponsibility which provoked the irritation of the autonomous presidents of the Valencian Community (Socialist), Murcia and Andalusia (Popular Party). And in the meantime, Madrid residents had until Monday to either stay on the beach or return to the capital. All this is totally absurd if the intention is to stop the expansion of the outbreak, while the opposite is permitted and strongly encouraged: that people travel from Madrid to the rest of the peninsula as if it were an August long weekend or a holiday.
The Catalan government has done well to stand up to the nonsense that was going down and to carry out an act of protection of its population. This and no other is the purpose of the measure announced by Torra.