Laurence Dollimore
ANDALUCIAN president Juanma Moreno has revealed he will push to see hotels and restaurants open in the southernmost region this summer.
The Partido Popular leader said in an interview on Telecinco’s Ana Rosa programme that the businesses should re-open ‘progressively and with sanitary guarantees’ to avoid ‘collapse’ and ‘economic catastrophe’ in the tourism sector.
He also demanded clarity over comments made by the Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz last week, which suggested tourism would not return until the end of the year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“I think it is possible, progessively and with the maximum sanitary measures, to open up the tourism sector,” said Moreno.
He admitted it would ‘not be the same’ as previous years, which welcomed on average 32 million visitors from around the world.
This summer, he said, it would have to rely on domestic tourists, given that it would be impossible to fully recover the British and Central European markets.
“We have to assume that it will not be be possible like last year,” he said, before insisting that he will push for the opening of beaches too.
Moreno has come up with a provisional plan with businesses in the sector, which includes establishments presenting a daily cleaning certificate and carrying out measures like taking temperatures at their entrances and ensuring tables are kept well apart.
Beaches, he said, should have a reduced capacity and be patrolled by police to uphold social distancing.
Moreno blasted the central government’s lack of a tourism rescue plan and demanded clarification over Diaz’s comments hinting at a cancelled summer.
“No one has clarified this for me and we expect a response,” he said, “we have tens of thousands of workers and thousands of small and self-employed entrepreneurs waiting.”
In the worst case scenario, a cancelled summer in terms of tourism could lose the region €15 billion and 120,000 jobs.
“We want to know if that was just the opinion of the minister or if it’s based on scientific data,” he added.
Moreno said his region should still be among the first to see lockdown restrictions lifted given its positive statistics on fighting coronavirus.
“We have to activate freedom of movement with caution,” he said, adding that police could control the access to certain towns to avoid further infections.
There are two puzzling things about Covid-19 that are startlingly different from other diseases. One, I have yet to see any actual laboratory purified Covid-19 virus particles identified, that have been isolated and typified scientifically by an appropriate authority, therefore proving its existence. I searched the CDC website and found none. Secondly, all diseases, before they can be scientifically described as an actual disease, must pass The Koch Postulates, or the Bradford Hill criteria, before being accepted as such by the medical community. Those tests have never been done, to my knowledge. Why not? Locking up and then quite possibly destroying the world’s economy deserves nothing less.
Whatever the forensic evidence, or lack of it may be, the empirical evidence of infection and deaths is overwhelming. Call it disease or the Devil, something is bumping people off in a big way.
Incidentally, if nobody has “seen” this virus, where was the imagery we are shown on TV drawn from? We’ve all seen it, looking like an old-fashioned floating mine and told it hooks onto us by using the protruding spikes. Is all that information culled from someone’s imagination?