Nations edge towards end of lockdown

Rome/Madrid, Singapore/New York, April 20

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Meanwhile, impatience has been growing in Italy over extension of lockdown due to a tottering economy. Italians debated on Sunday their first cautious steps out of a coronavirus lockdown that has left an estimated half of the working population seeking government support. The disease has officially killed 23,227 in Italy — second only to the United States.

The growing sense that weeks of confinement were ending forced an unnamed source in Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s office to tell media that “nothing will change”.

But some officials seem to think that extending the strictest lockdown measures beyond their May 3 deadline might simply not work.

The daily death rate has fallen to half of what it was at the peak of the crisis and people — feeling less frightened but more stir crazy — may simply start going out.

Conte is expected to hear on Monday the conclusions of a re-opening taskforce headed by former Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao. The pressure on Conte from the leaders of Italy’s northern industrial heartland is also growing intense.

The heads of Milan’s Lombardy and Venice’s Veneto regions have both warned that they might soon have to begin reopening businesses on their own.

The La Repubblica daily estimated Sunday that 11.5 million Italians — exactly half of the official workforce — have stopped receiving incomes and started applying for aid.

La Repubblica added that most of the funds approved by Conte in a 25-billion-euro (USD 27-billion) package have already been spent.

Public health institute director Silvio Brusaferro said Italians will have to eventually find a cautious way out. “Living with the virus means re-designing our days,” he told the Corriere della Sera daily. “Everyone has to give up something.”

Spain, too, saw a sharp drop in daily virus death toll on Sunday with the number falling to 410 from 565. The total fatalities in Spain, the third hardest-hit country in the world after the US and Italy, have reached 20,453, the health ministry said. In Netherlands the steady flow of new cases continued on Sunday

However, in Singapore the coronavirus has continued to spread in the crowded dormitories for migrant workers, accounting for a majority of the 596 new cases detected on Sunday. According to the latest health ministry data, only 25 of the new cases involve Singaporeans or foreigners with permanent residence, reports Efe news. With this, the total number of cases in the city-state has gone up to 6,588, the highest in Southeast Asia.

In the worst-hit USA, New York reported 540 more coronavirus deaths overnight, a reduction of 25 per cent from the previous day, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, but the state still remained the epicentre of the pandemic in the US. “If you look at the past three days, you could argue we are past the plateau and starting to descend,” the Governor said on Saturday at his daily COVID-19 briefing.

While Friday saw the smallest number of new fatalities in two weeks, some 2,000 people with coronavirus symptoms were admitted to hospitals in the city, a figure comparable to the situation late last month, when the pandemic was growing at an alarming rate. Cuomo said that authorities are particularly concerned about the threat posed by the COVID-19 to residents of nursing homes.

In planning for the rollback of restrictions on people’s movements and activity, the governor emphasised that a complete re-opening of the economy will only be possible with vastly expanded testing accompanied by tracing, which is very labour-intensive.