I had to laugh when I saw an article today wherein "civil servants" (or whatever they call them in spain) were complaining about the "closure" of our provincial capital of Malaga - and demanding that something be done about it.
The reason is that Malaga hit the threshold of 1000 cases per 100000 people last Monday, thus must go into the most severe state of lockdown closure, which demands that all "non-essential" businesses be closed. Why, even Ikea has had to put out notifications that its megastore is off limits.
The reason the bureaucrats were upset was because the numbers went over the limit on Monday, but quickly went back down again. Unfortunately for them, the rules are that any municipality that hits the threshold has to implement severe lockdown of businesses for 14 days. This 14 day period was an arbitrary addition as they realised that a lot of the small municipalities would be in and out of lockdown on a daily case with just one case being registered - and that was too silly for words.
And why has this come about? Well, in my opinion, it is due to the idleness of the reporting system that doesn´t operate over a weekend - thus last Monday actually had an "uptick" of cases from Friday through to Monday - thus 3 days worth of data. By Wednesday, the anomaly had passed into the 14-day rolling average, but it was too late.
I think this sort of thing is nowadays known as the "law of unintended consequences", but I think that it is more accurately entitled "not thinking it through beforehand", thus victims of their own poor planning.
Actually, I shouldn´t laugh - we are probably going to have the same problem next weekend in Mijas (unless they change the rules by then).
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