Alana Moceri
MADRID—On the first Friday in March, Spain was deep into the rigorous hand-washing phase of its response to the coronavirus pandemic, but still about a week away from a lockdown. That night, I met a friend at a quiet tapas bar close to home. Afterward, we went to another bar in the Arguelles neighborhood, a popular late-night haunt for students at several nearby universities. It was the typical Friday pandemonium of people yelling orders, drinks and plates being passed around, and used napkins covering the floor. As I washed down my Spanish omelet with a glass of Verdejo, I looked around and remarked, “This is the perfect place to pass around the virus.”
It would be my last night out for the foreseeable future, yet even at that point, it was pretty stupid to head into any bar, let alone one that crowded. Since then, Spain has become one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with a confirmed death toll of more than 15,000 people. No one can say whether that number might now be lower if authorities had acted more quickly or if people had taken the virus more seriously. But there are still some broad lessons to take from countries like Spain.
First, no one really believes that this virus will affect them until it’s actually killing people in their own country, in their own hospitals. This has played out in country after country. It is part of why too many governments, especially Spain’s, have been slow to take action.
I wasn’t the only one thoughtlessly mixing with crowds that weekend. The right-wing Vox party held a rally on March 8 that was attended by 9,000 people at Madrid’s Vistalegre arena, previously a bullfighting ring. It was a counter-protest to that day’s annual International Women’s Day march, in which tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Spain’s capital. The march was promoted by the ruling Socialist Party and their junior coalition partner, Podemos, as a victory lap after securing Cabinet approval for their so-called Sexual Freedom Law. There were consequences in both cases. The Vox party’s two senior-most figures, Javier Ortega Smith and Santiago Abascal, ended up testing positive for the novel coronavirus, as did the equality minister, Irene Montero of Podemos, who led the women’s march.
Over the following week, the country’s leading politicians bickered over whether to impose a national lockdown, finally agreeing to do so on March 14. Spain is not alone among Western governments that failed to act quickly. But some Spaniards were initially hesitant to support a widespread lockdown, partly due to concerns over the economic fallout. The kind of radical action needed to combat this crisis is tough, if not impossible, for any government to implement without public opinion behind it.
But when Spaniards eventually came around to support the lockdown, the government, as in many countries, did not communicate to them a clear and concise definition of what the lockdown meant. This is partly a lesson for policymakers about the importance of good messaging. But it is also a lesson for citizens about the need to bridge the disconnect between knowing what’s expected of them as a community and putting it into action as individuals.
Spain’s coronavirus response shows that the kind of radical action needed to combat this crisis is tough for any government to implement without public opinion behind it.
During the first weekend of the lockdown, sunny weather enticed Madrilenos to the city’s public parks in droves, making it difficult to keep a healthy distance. Others went to their country houses in the mountains and coastal towns, a dangerous move that threatened to overwhelm the under-equipped health care facilities and staff in Spain’s outlying regions. The government then tightened up the lockdown, reminding people that it was not a free vacation and imploring them to return to their primary residences. The same pattern has played out elsewhere, notably in France and Norway.
Still, Spaniards have found creative ways to get out for walks. While some joke about renting out their dogs, others use walking their dog as an excuse to go visit friends. Some people have made multiple trips to the grocery store to get in even more walks—first for bread, then milk, then meat and so on. In Spain, this sort of mild law-breaking behavior is affectionately called la picaresca, which roughly translates as “roguishness.” Police were characteristically gentle at first but have had to tighten things up, handing out a record 128,000 fines during the first 15 days for not obeying the state of emergency. In the most severe cases, violators were charged up to $32,000. Such heavy-handed tactics may not have been necessary had clearer guidelines been laid out from the start.
As Spain settled into the lockdown, a third and much more hopeful lesson has emerged about resilience and solidarity. Early on, I found a note from a neighbor in the entryway of my building with his name and phone number offering help, especially to anyone older. One friend tells me she has been pleasantly surprised by the solidarity she’s seen and that in her building, neighbors check in with each other before they go shopping. Another friend says that her neighbors created a WhatsApp group so they can check up on each other. It’s been widely reported that our evenings are marked by applause and cheers pouring out of windows, balconies and terraces at 8 p.m. in appreciation of health care workers and others on the front lines. The French also applaud, like New Yorkers too, while the Italians sing.
Medical professionals have been referred to in Spain as “health care kamikazes”—they risk their own lives, often without personal protective equipment, to save ours. Nearly 14 percent of confirmed coronavirus cases in Spain are health care workers. Many Spaniards, exceedingly proud of their health care system, have been devastated to see medical professionals forced to take such risks. Bloomberg ranked Spain the world’s healthiest country last year, and it has one of the world’s highest life expectancies, in no small part because of its excellent public health care system. Yet that system has also suffered in recent years from funding cuts and a wave of privatization implemented by right-wing governments, and Spaniards are now feeling the symptoms of those measures acutely.
Unfortunately, others have taken their personal zeal to be part of the solution too far. Many of the same people who applaud the health care workers every evening have self-deputized as the “balcony police,” yelling or even spitting at anyone they see in the street. Sadly, this has included even cherished health care workers themselves and others who are essential, such as supermarket clerks, or people with autism, who have special permission to go out.
While this is a very small group of people, it is nonetheless a sign of how quickly people condemn those perceived as not respecting the rules. Many have also directed their ire at foreign countries that were slow to implement a full lockdown. It’s been particularly frustrating and painful for Americans in Spain to watch this unfold in the United States, which is at least a week or two behind Spain’s outbreak. A friend noted that she “felt like a crazed lunatic sending messages of STAY INSIDE to [her] cousins in California.”
If we are the least bit capable of recognizing and learning from the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic, then we might just be able to see how this crisis relates to other impending disasters facing humanity. Just as an outbreak of this magnitude was long predicted by infectious disease experts, scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades about climate change, which will exacerbate other slowly unfolding crises, from food security to migration, to name just a few. Governments must act, and in concert with each other, but as the various responses to COVID-19 has made clear, democratically elected ones are both enabled and constrained by the people. Weeks into the lockdowns, the underlying question is whether or not this pandemic will force a change in individual behavior. The burden, after all, is everyone’s to bear.
Alana Moceri is an international relations analyst, writer and professor at the European University of Madrid and the IE School of Global and Public Affairs.
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