Merely a couple of days after getting parliamentary approval to extend obligatory mask use in exteriors, the Government announced it will end next week.

Therefore on the 10th it will no longer be obligatory to wear a mask whilst out on the streets – its use in interiors continues, of course.

The Minister for Public Health, Carolina Darias, said in an interview on Radio Cadena Ser: “The mask for outside use will cease to be obligatory in Spain next week. On the 8th the Board of Ministers will approve a Royal Decree to eliminate it.”

This means that although it is passed by the Board of Ministers on the 8th, it won’t be published in the BOE (Official State Gazette) until the 9th when it will say it will come into force at midnight that day.

However, she will take the decision before the Consejo Interterritorial del Sistema Nacional de Salud (where regional health ministers will be consulted) on Monday before approving the Royal Decree the next day. This is so that regions run by opposition parties cannot say that they were no consulted beforehand.

She said that face masks have been an “affective barrier” when it was made obligatory in exteriors over Christmas when there were many people mingling on the streets doing their Christmas shopping.

In the radio interview she was asked why she had forced the obligation through, packaged with a pensions rise (which was extremely controversial) if she was going to eliminate it only days later. But she dodged the question by saying that it was a formality that the Decree passed at Christmas be convalidated in parliament.

The fact is that most medical advisory bodies had said that wearing masks in exteriors was unnecessary and that there was not credibile scientific reports to support imposing it.

It is worth mentioning that whilst Madrid, Cataluña, Castilla y León and Galicia (three of whom are PP led) called for it to be dropped, the Comunidad Valenciana, Cantabria, Andalucía and País Vasco insisted that it be maintained until contagion levels dropped lower (Andalucia is also PP led, the other regions are Government allied independent parties).

Editorial comment: without a doubt the Government should not have forced the issue by packaging with another bill that nobody would seriously vote against. Had they posed the mask issue separately and it had been rejected by parliament then at least they could have always said, they had tried. As it stands, such was the politial attrition they have had to back-pedal, which has cost them even more Smartie points.

(News: Spain)