Graham Keeley
CATALUNYA will relax Covid-19 restrictions from Monday by allowing citizens to travel anywhere in the region and permitting bars and restaurants to open during the day.
Face to face university classes and professional training will be permitted.
Meetings will still be restricted to a maximum of six people but they do not have to be between people who live in the same house.
Bars and restaurants will be allowed to open from 7.30am to 5pm, which represents a slight extension of current hours.
Shopping centres will be able to reopen regardless of their size.
Gymnasiums will allowed to increase the capacity of people from 30% to 50%.
However, the relaxation of restrictions will only last a week until May 3.
Alba Verges, a Catalan regional minister for health, said even though the situation had stabilised authorities should “relax measures with caution, little by little”.
Verges said that the Fira de Barcelona, exhibition and concert hall, will be used as large venue for vaccinations, known as a ‘vacunodromo’, but no date has been set for this to start.
The 14-day coronavirus contagion rate for Catalunya was 256.37 per 100,000 people on Thursday, according to Spain’s Ministry of Health, compared with the national figure of 232.55.
Spain’s left-wing government has said that it has no plans to extend the state of emergency which ends on May 9.
For the past six months, Spain’s 17 regions have had the power to restrict the movement of citizens, order curfews and close businesses in order to curb the spread of the pandemic.
Health experts and legal analysts have said that this could leave Spain’s authorities in a kind of legal limbo as they try to stop the spread of coronavirus.
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