| I'm afraid politics have been a big part of bad decisions. There were enough cues to stop the rally and they still encouraged people to go there. Not that the other side isn't being as idiotic now, asking for raising the restrictions immediately. But there's no excuse for March 8th. Different agencies had clearly warned what was happening and were ignored. Edit: for fargren, what I mean encouraging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Juy7YnqCTQ For extrangers: it's the vice-prime minister saying on tv that all women should go to the rallies because "it's a matter of live or death" to them. Indeed. There are many facts that have been arising later, like ministry of health forbidding doctors to attend conventions, police acquiring masks massively and several medical agencies and organizations advicing against the rallies. It was a typical case of management discarding what every technician under them was telling them for politics. Edit 2: please don't adopt the typical partisan position with "the opposition was also organizing rallies". No they weren't. There was one party that had its national convention around the same days. Still, it isn't comparable. The government had the direct access to the official sources of information and ignored and hid them. This isn't a right vs. left matter. More to the left is labour minister Ribera and she was correct to inform the public of how lockdown scenarios would affect workplaces. No good deed goes unpunished, everybody attacked her from all sides... until a few days later it became obvious that what she said was unavoidable. In the right wing, Ayuso was correctly willing to wait a couple of weeks more to open Madrid, when her coalition partner Aguado forced her to ask for immediate unlock. Central government didn't consent, so change of position was useless, but now there's a left for lockdown, right for unlock division, that's it. I won't go into the masks issue. It's too painful to just recall. |
To be clear, I think the 8th was a mistake. But at the same time, the opposition was organizing rallies and those were not stopped either. There were also massive football matches. At the time, I think the government simply underestimated what was going on, in a large part because the OMS guidance wasn't prudent enough. The fact the 8M aligns with the government may have entered into it, but it's not clear given other events that happened around those dates.