Spanish president Pedro Sánchez has accepted the Catalan government's plan for children deconfinement, and has announced that it will be implemented as from April 27th, although he has avoided mentioning the Catalan government, and has only referred to its experts. As was expected, Sánchez has also announced that tomorrow he will propose to the autonomous communities’ presidents to extend the state of alarm for 15 days until May 9th.
Sánchez made the announcement about the underage today, just 5 hours after the Catalan government presented its proposal, which Catalan president Quim Torra will defend tomorrow in the presidents' meeting. Unlike the Catalan government, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party did not give any details on how the child deconfinement should be done. He will give further details as we approach the 27th. He simply said that "It will be implemented according to the Healthcare Law, which refers to the 12-year age group. The towns will be of great importance."
The Spanish president insisted that future measures will not be equal to those taken up to now, instead, we will go through different "states of alarm". "I say this in plural", he stressed. He also rectified on the uniformizing strategy that the Spanish government has followed up to now, and recognized that the de-escalation cannot be identical everywhere. Though "not necessarily based on autonomous communities’ territories", he warned.
Sánchez avoided self-criticism and justified the centralising route he used these weeks as if it had been a total success. "From the first moment, giving a common response has benefited the whole country, all Spaniards, wherever they live," he said.
Looking ahead, he asked for patience. "We have left behind the most extreme moments, but before lifting the general lockdown we still need more things," he argued. "We have to make more progress before starting the de-escalation and achieving the much-anticipated normality," he assured. He indicated that the ending of the lockdown will be slow. "We must approach this de-escalation with the utmost humility, perhaps we will take decisions that, subsequently, we will have to cancel and that won’t be a failure. We are learning," he added.
The Spanish president made no reference to the controversy caused by the defective masks distributed by the health ministry, which caused an outrage in the healthcare sector. He assured that the unity in the Spanish government between the PSOE and Podemos is absolute.
Sánchez announced that tomorrow the health ministry will approve a command to regulate the price of the masks.