MADRID: From palm-lined beaches in southern India to the bar-filled streets of a Spanish island and the hills of Ireland, restaurants, pubs and clubs are emerging at the forefront of efforts to save it from the resurgence of coronaviruses.
With Europe’s summer vacation season kicking into high gear for millions weary of months of lockdown, scenes of drunken British and German tourists on Spain’s Mallorca island ignoring social distancing rules and reports of American visitors flouting quarantine measures in Ireland are raising fears of a resurgence of infections in countries that have battled for months to flatten the COVID-19 curve.
The vaccine candidate will begin examining another 30,000 people on July 27.
Germany’s foreign minister has condemned outrages for jeopardizing the gains made with so much effort in efforts to involve the virus.
“We have recently controlled the reopening of borders in Europe. We threatened this through reckless behavior,” Heiko Maas told Funke Media Group on Thursday. “Otherwise, additional measures will be unavoidable.”
In a move designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus and shake off the region’s reputation as a party hub, regional authorities in the Balearic Islands ordered the closure from Thursday of all establishments along Mallorca’s “Beer St.” and “Ham St.,” as the popular party areas near the beach of Palma de Mallorca are known, and on another boulevard in nearby Magaluf.
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Bar owners reacted angrily to the new restrictions on the islands that have seen, like most regions in Spain, recent small spikes in infections, none of which were traced to visiting tourists or party hotspots. Bars and nightclubs employ some 20,000 people in the region.
“They are undertaking drastic measures that are typical of other countries, closing entire streets and curtailing the free exercise of private initiative,” Jesús Sánchez, who leads a local business association told The Associated Press. He blamed “clandestine parties” for some of the images of tourists ignoring virus containment measures.
The revelers of Mallorca were in stark contrast to a solemn memorial service on Thursday morning in Madrid, where the relatives of about one hundred COVID-19 sufferers sat socially distant, along with representatives of the fitness staff and other important professions and with the King and Queen of Spain pays tribute to the dead and those fighting against the pandemic.
Experts hoped that the summer heat could mitigate COVID-19. But the record heat, as well as a rapidly spreading virus, continues in the United States.
In an emotional speech, Hernando Calleja said he shared the pain of the loss of his brother José María, a well-known journalist and in Madrid, with other relatives of “anonymous” victims.
“Let’s not say that the coronavirus was and remains a cold, ruthless and destructive executioner,” Calleja said during the rite at the Royal Palace in Madrid.
Another European access point, Greece, lifted the flight ban from Britain on 15 July and on Thursday welcomed the first randomly tested arrivals at Athens airport.
Alexandros Maziotis, a Greek living in the UK, said he had been examined.
“I plan to be a little careful, especially the first week, so I make sure I don’t give anything to my parents,” he said.
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In France, which has noticed new outbreaks, Prime Minister Jean Castex said the mask would be mandatory in closed public posts since next week, before 1 August, as announced in the past. One of the highest sacred sites of the Catholic Church, Lourdes, organized her first pilgrimage online, to commemorate the anniversary of the statements of the 19th-century woman Bernadette Soubirous that the Virgin Mary had given her the impression there.
While strict blocking measures have hampered transmission of the virus in much of Europe, the symptoms of a wave of infections are multiplying and the pandemic is accelerating further elsewhere.
Finland is one of the countries that is comfortable with blocking measures. On Wednesday night, dozens of other people covered the property from side to side to enter a Helsinki nightclub.
More than 13.5 million other people have swelled internationally and more than 580,000 have died, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally. It is idea that the true numbers are much higher for several reasons, adding limited evidence.
The record accumulation of approximately 32,700 instances in India led to its total to approximately 1 million and led the government to reimpose a three-day blockade and a night-time curfew in the popular beach state of Goa, two weeks after it reopened tourists.
Even with the increase in gas, they continue to decline much more than they did a year ago.
The state’s top-elected official, Pramod Sawant, said other people were circumventing social estrangement regulations and not dressed in face masks. Nearly 40,000 more people have been fined in the last two weeks for not wearing a mask.
Israel also recorded a new record for coronavirus cases shown, and a new national closure gave the impending impression.
Hezi Levi, director general of the Ministry of Health, told the army radio that he would go to an assembly on Thursday for stricter movement restrictions, adding a national closure imaginable over the weekend.
Even in Japan, which has fewer than 23,000 confirmed cases and about 1,000 deaths, officials are fretting about moves to revitalize the hard-hit tourism industry. Tokyo confirmed a record 286 confirmed infections Thursday.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged a need to re-examine a government campaign offering discounts for traveling within Japan that is set to start next week. “We are looking at the situation with a high level of nervousness,” Abe said.
In California, organizers canceled the 2021 New Year’s Day Rose Parade in Pasadena for the first time in 75 years, fearing that even six months from now infections could spread among participants and the hundreds of thousands who line the route.
Americans heading overseas were causing consternation in Ireland, amid fears that some were ignoring the government’s requirement that they self-isolate for 14 days after arrival. The Irish Post cited restaurant owners who complained that they had no way of knowing if American visitors had completed the two-week quarantine.
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Showing that there may be a way forward, China has the first economy to resume expansion since the start of the pandemic in its central city of Wuhan. It reported an unforeseen 3.2% expansion in the last quarter after the lifting of antivirus locks and the reopening of factories and stores. The 6.8% contraction in January-March was the country’s worst slowdown since at least the mid-1960s.
But economic news is bleak in Britain, where the workplace of national statistics said transparent symptoms were emerging that job losses will skyrocket in the coming months to degrees that have not been noticed since the 1980s.
They said there were 649,000 fewer people, or 2.2%, on the payroll in June compared to March, when the UK government imposed closure restrictions.
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Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, and Kurtenbach from Bangkok. Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report.