MADRID: Spain’s government on Tuesday said it would seek parliament’s approval to extend the state of emergency by another fortnight, until June 7, even as the number of new coronavirus cases keeps falling.

The current state of emergency is set to expire on May 23 and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had initially said he would seek an extension of around a month.

But the government reduced the request to two weeks to secure the support of the centre-right Ciudadanos party, thereby guaranteeing it would pass during Wednesday’s vote in the 350-seat chamber where Sanchez’s coalition is in a minority.

The novel coronavirus has killed at least 318,517 people since the outbreak first emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources issued on Tuesday night.

At least 318,000 people killed across the planet

At least 4.8 million cases of coronavirus have been registered in 196 countries and territories. Of these, at least 1.75m people are now considered recovered.

The tally probably reflects only a fraction of the actual number of infections. Many countries are testing only symptomatic or the most serious cases.

The United States has the highest number of deaths overall with 90,369 from 1,508,957 cases. At least 283,178 people have been declared recovered.

Britain has the second highest toll overall, with 34,796 deaths from 246,406 cases.

It is followed by Italy with 32,007 deaths and 225,886 cases, France with 28,239 deaths and 179,938 infections and Spain with 27,709 fatalities for 231,606 cases.

China — excluding Hong Kong and Macau — has to date declared 4,634 deaths and 82,960 cases. It has 78,241 recovered cases.

Europe has a total of 167,668 deaths from 1,919,572 cases, the United States and Canada have 96,312 deaths and 1,587,029 cases, Latin America and the Caribbean have 30,604 deaths and 547,252 cases, Asia has 12,674 deaths and 374,905 cases, the Middle East has 8,296 deaths and 290,672 cases, Africa has 2,835 deaths from 88,204 cases, and Oceania 128 deaths from 8,414 cases.

“If there is no state of emergency, we won’t have the capacity to restrict movement and the ongoing sacrifice that everyone has made will have served for nothing,” Spanish government’s spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said.

The lockdown was first imposed on March 14 and it has since been renewed four times, despite growing criticism of Sanchez over his management of the crisis, notably from his rightwing opponents who did not support the last extension two weeks ago.

The government has also not ruled out a further extension, having shown itself in favour of continuing until the rollback of the lockdown restrictions is completed at the end of June.

“Limiting mobility, which is a fundamental right, can only be achieved like this,” said Health Minister Salvador Illa.

The government says the decree has allowed it to battle the epidemic and bring down the daily number of new cases, which on Tuesday stood at 295, health ministry figures showed. Over the same period, 83 people died from the virus, in what was the third straight day the figure had been under 100.

Fernando Simon, the health ministry’s emergencies coordinator, said the medical authorities had managed to reduce the time between initial consultation and diagnosis of infection “to under 48 hours”.

This, he said, meant that “if the cases of the epidemic flared up again, we would be capable of locating (them) quickly”.

Spain has suffered one of the most deadly outbreaks of the virus, suffering more than 27000 deaths out of more than 230,000 cases.

But the government’s management of the crisis has come under fire in recent days with street protests in Madrid and other cities, where demonstrators banged pots and demanded Sanchez’s resignation amid cries of “freedom”.

“(These protests) are demanding freedom of movement and what that means at this point in time... is the freedom for the infection to spread and freedom to impact the health of other people,” spokeswoman Montero said.

Figures from a survey by the state-run Centre for Sociological Studies (CIS) published on Tuesday showed 95 per cent of Spaniards support the lockdown and 60 per cent believe it should be extended, despite the protests.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2020