Spain’s tourism industry unlikely to fully reopen before end of year
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Spain’s COVID-19 lockdown is unlikely to be fully lifted until the end of 2020, the Government has warned, according to a report published on The Olive Press.
The report said that Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz revealed that there will be a two-stage plan to ‘re-open Spain’.
The first phase is expected to start in June and and it should be focused in a way that big businesses begin to return gradually, including banks and companies in the production sector.
Diario Sur said that moost other industries will have their return prolonged until nearer the end of the year. “We are working on two phases for the de-escalation,” said Diaz, “one for the summer and the other for the end of the year.”
The decision is interpreted that the country’s vital tourism industry – responsible for 12% of GDP and 13% of all employment – could effectively miss much of the 2020 campaign.
Meanwhile the number of daily coronavirus deaths in Spain reached 565 on Saturday, a slight fall from Friday when 585 victims were reported for the previous 24-hour period.
According to figures released by the Health Ministry, a total of 20,043 Covid-19-related deaths have been recorded in Spain, with 191,726 confirmed infections, up 3,658 from 188,068 on Friday, and 74,662 patients discharged from hospital after recovering.
The Health Ministry has this week been revising the statistics recorded so far, after the central government sent an order to Spain’s 17 regions in a bid to homogenize the often chaotic reporting from each healthcare system.
The figure, updated on a daily basis by the Health Ministry, includes everyone who has tested positive for the virus. But there is another data set that helps give an idea of the dimension of the pandemic in Spain: the number of possible cases.
These include people who have not been given any kind of test, but whose symptoms correspond to a patient who is suffering from the Covid-19 disease caused by the coronavirus. The 10 of Spain’s 17 Spanish regions who are tracking this data have detected at least 419,000 possible cases, according to the information that EL PAÍS has compiled. Madrid and Catalonia account for 73% of them.
