Madrid Rejected To Close Perimeter

Madrid will not close at Easter or on the San José bridge. After two weeks pointing out the refusal to this blockade between March 17 and 21 and March 26 to April 9, the Executive of Isabel Díaz Ayuso castles and does not accept the agreement taken on Wednesday afternoon in the Interterritorial Council of Health (CISNS).

It is the only region that has. It has been confirmed by the Minister of Health Enrique Ruiz Escudero: “Madrid is not going to close perimeter.” Given the possibility of resorting to this measure, he specified, the “current competent delegate” to decide is “the president of the Community”: “We will take the measures that we believe appropriate.”

The rest of the measures that were on the table, the curfew and the maximum number of people who can meet outdoors, will be maintained based on the current restrictions that the Community has, 23.00 in terms of night mobility and six people to outdoor capacity.

Something in which the central government has given margin although establishing these restrictions as minimum agreements, that is, without prejudice to the autonomies hardening the measures.

The reasons for disagreeing with the perimeter film were already explained last Friday by the Deputy Minister of Public Health, Antonio Zapatero, and Ruiz Escudero has repeated them this Wednesday, and it is that “the previous experience” of the three that the region has already had was not “favorable”.

The result, he explained, was “an increase in cases” within the autonomy, because the closure of a region like Madrid, “a single province, with seven million inhabitants, generates a lot of mobility, and the cases in Madrid rose”, said the deputy councilor .

The data does not reflect the same. The epidemiologist Gloria Hernandez Pezzi, former head of the Epidemiological Surveillance Service at the Carlos III Health Institute, assures that “the statement that the total confinements of the Community of Madrid have not worked is free, since it is not supported by anything that demonstrates its effectiveness or ineffectiveness ”.

This measure, he says, must be accompanied by others. “In October and November the trend of cases remained downward, and the short application periods, three or four days of bridges, do not allow their assessment either,” he explains.

In December and January, he adds, ” the cases increased after the aforementioned confinements, but not due to them , since in those periods various causes were combined that caused the third wave of covid throughout the country.”

The first of these perimeter films occurred on alternate days for the bridge of Todos los Santos and the festival of La Almudena , it was imposed by the central government, although it allowed Madrid to make that intermittent blockade. Madrid, since the autonomy closures began, has never been in favor. On several occasions, Díaz Ayuso repeated that Madrid would only close if it was “strictly necessary.”

The second, by decision of the Community – with the recommendation of the Ministry of Health -, in December, for the holidays of the Immaculate Conception and the following weekend . On that occasion, both Zapatero and Isabel Díaz Ayuso defended extending the closure out of solidarity with the rest of the communities.

“It is a surgical measure to collaborate with the rest of the administrations to avoid massive displacements and get a pulse and continue to lower the number of infections in the face of such an important date as Christmas,” the president said then.

And the third, the Christmas period, between December 23 and January 6. In which Madrid had to obey the closure although Ayuso declared that she did not feel linked ; The measures, said the then Minister of Health Salvador Illa, were mandatory. Exactly as the CISNS agreement now marks, which includes two types of measures, those that the regions are obliged to take and recommendations.

Mobility, both territorial and nocturnal, and the limitation of people who can meet are among the first. While with the perimeter closure there has been no flexibility, the Government has opened the number of people who can stay together, which it foresaw at four and leaves at six.

“The permanence of groups of people will be limited to a maximum of four in spaces closed public spaces and six in open public spaces, except in the case of cohabitants. In private spaces, meetings will be limited to cohabitants ”. And also in that of the curfew: “The right of night mobility will be limited at most from 23:00 hours and until 6:00 hours.”

Among the recommendations is “not to lower the level of alert in which the autonomous community is from the two weeks prior to the start of Holy Week (that is, from March 12) even if the indicators are favorable, and therefore maintain the measures established at that time, or increase them if the evolution of the indicators so requires ”.

In addition to not holding massive events that “involve crowding or concentration of people”, launch an institutional campaign “to avoid the relaxation of behaviors” with the slogan We do not save weeks, we save lives, and the coordination of all measures with municipalities .