Little by little, Covid-19 seems to be moving away from our lives. We are leaving behind a real nightmare that has up till now caused 14,595 deaths in Catalonia and has left huge consequences on society, from the youngest to the oldest. The epidemiological indicators are positive, more than three million people (38.5%) have been vaccinated with the first dose, about 1.8 million Catalans (22.5%) are fully vaccinated and there have been several days recently with no deaths recorded.
The topics of debate are changing and if we have spent almost fifteen months talking about which spaces needed to be closed to control the spread of the pandemic, now it is just the opposite and the issue is how long until we can re-open what is still closed, such as nightlife. It will certainly take time to get back to normal with the appropriate regulations, of course, but it is necessary so that the frequency of botellons - drinking parties in the street - falls back to pre-pandemic levels.
New Covid debates are being added that are pulling us out of the information tunnel in which we have been buried since the second half of March last year. The latest issue, whether vaccination should now be carried out universally, without being regulated by age groups as it has been so far. A debate that can only take place when there is a double combination of a significant percentage of vaccinated citizens and positive data.
In this situation, it is more important than ever that the Spanish government gives broad latitude to the autonomous communities to manage their own exit plans, because no one knows the situation on the ground better than they do. The past errors of taking a uniform approach, something Spanish governments are so prone to do under any circumstance, should not occur again.
We will have to remain vigilant and attentive to the data, that is obvious. But once the worst phase of the coronavirus is over and with the data we have today, we need to quickly embark on an economic recovery that will no doubt be uneven, because many people have lost their jobs or businesses along the way. But it must be the private initiative that takes over now, strong enough for the ERTO furlough plans linked to the pandemic to also end up being history.