Release for some, jeopardy for others

We’re emerging here in Valencia. Slowly. With a little optimism.

We’ve moved into phase 2 of the Lockdown relaxation process. With some justification. According to the Health Ministry, Spain has just had two days without a single Coronavirus death anywhere. Friends of ours from a few doors down the street tell us that their daughter, a nurse in the major local hospital, is being redeployed to Oncology after a couple of months in intensive care. The ICU beds are empty at the moment.

The only jarring note is that the Ministry has also warned that there are signs of an increase in infections as the restrictions relax. We’re clearly not quite out of the woods yet. It’s going to be face masks and social distancing for a while yet. Maybe even rubber gloves.

Still, we needed to celebrate our entry into phase 2. And what better way to do it than to go back to the sea? Especially if we took advantage of the new regulations to go there with friends. So we drove to a lovely spot south of Valencia, El Saler, with Maria José and Santi, our near-neighbours and the parents of the no-longer-ICU nurse I mentioned before.

The beach at El Saler

The day started relatively grey, but that meant the temperature was ideal for walking, warm enough for tee shirts, cool enough to be comfortable. We started in an almost jungle-like nature reserve before heading for the beach where we could walk with our feet in the surf.

The Nature Reserve at El Saler

A forest dweller we met

The company was great, the place was glorious, and as we walked, so the clouds cleared and we finished the outing, back in the woods, with bright sunlight filtering through the tree cover.

Danielle and Maria José wandering into the sunlight

It was a fine way of celebrating our emergence into a freer life. And it lifted my mood which had been rather depressed by a Tweet I saw in the morning from Trisha Greenhalgh: “I’ve never been so scared. There. Is. No. Plan.”

When I first heard Trish Greenhalgh, she was giving a conference presentation of remarkable brilliance. So brilliant that I wrote a post about it at the time. She is one of the leading Public Health specialists in England and one of the most convincing experts on evidence-based medicine I’ve ever heard.

If she is worried about the government simply having no plan, it seems to me a lot of other people should be too.

There’s much to criticise the government for in Spain. It was painfully slow in recognising the seriousness of the crisis about to hit the country. As a result it did far too little to prepare for it and reacted far later than it should have. But when it awoke to what it had to do, it acted fast, decisively and effectively. The results are obvious, as we've been slowly emerging from lockdown for a month now, and have had two days without a death.

It won’t necessarily benefit the government. Its vote seems to be more or less holding up, but it certainly isn’t improving, and the Conservative opposition is progressing. Given how well the government’s performed, that hardly seems just, but politics is an unkind game.

Meanwhile, Britain has a government which, as Greenhalgh puts it, simply has. no. plan. It never has had a strategy, but has stumbled from crisis to crisis since the pandemic hit, making up policy on the hoof, inventing commitments out of thin air and then failing to honour them.

Now it’s relaxing a lockdown that was never as strict as Spain’s, and doing so far too early. Spain, with its slow start, long had a far worse record in deaths per million than the UK, but the gap is now so small that it looks as though Britain will move beyond Spain in a matter of days.

The hasty relaxation is happening only in England, I should say. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with better governments, are being more prudent. The fear, and it’s certainly Greenhalgh’s, is that the Cummings/Johnson English administration is opening the UK up to a second wave of infection. The population certainly doesn’t deserve that fate, but I fear that can only be fixed when it chooses itself a better government.

Meanwhile, over here we’re slowly moving towards a new normal. There’s no reason for complacency, so it involves a lot of use of face masks, of hand gel, even of gloves. But we can go out more, we can meet friends, we can even get our hair cut or go to the dentist.

The dentist, in fact, was the downside of our first day in Phase 2. After the visit to El Saler, I had to head into town – my first metro trip since March, with gloves and mask and an empty seat next to each seated passenger – to visit the dentist. Who proceeded to beat the daylights out of my jaw, far longer in my view than strictly necessary, since it never offered him the slightest resistance.

Still, it was a small price to pay for another step out of lockdown. I just hope it doesn’t lead to a surge of disease. As I hope there’s no new peak in England either. 

Let’s hope Greenhalgh’s fears prove unfounded.

Danielle and Maria José collecting seashells