Daily Times

A million people in and around the Spanish capital on Monday were under a new lockdown to contain another coronavirus surge, as the US death toll neared 200,000.

Top British advisors meanwhile warned that England was on course for about 50,000 coronavirus cases a day by mid-October and a rising death toll unless the public got serious about preventive action. The global death toll stood at 961,531 at 1100 GMT on Monday, according to an AFP tally based on official statistics, with more than 31 million infections. The restrictions in Madrid will last for two weeks, affecting people living mainly in densely populated, low-income neighbourhoods who will be allowed only to travel for essential reasons such as work, medical care or taking children to school. Police cars stopped vehicles at random on a main avenue in Puente de Vallecas, a working class neighbourhood in southern Madrid, to check if people had a valid reason to leave the area.

Most accepted the measures with resignation but some complained that the restrictions were not imposed across the affected region. “You can’t close one part of a neighbourhood and not another one, one street yes, and one street no. So, either you close everything, which will be catastrophic, or you close nothing,” said Alejandro Campos, a 30-year-old travel agent. “But first, I think that we should do something with the metro, for example. Here in Puente de Vallecas we have one of the most crowded stations in Madrid,” he said. But Gustavo Ojeda, 56, said “something had to be done” because of the new oubtreaks.

Authorities in Spain — among the worst-hit nations in the world — have insisted the step is necessary because virus cases in those districts were much higher than the national average.

African migrants were meanwhile still arriving en masse in Spain’s Canary Islands.