Lockdown

With these crazy days now, I thought why not talk about what the lockdown here it like, not only near Villarreal, but also around some towns like Onda, Burriana, Nules or La Vall d’Uixó, as the initiatives of Villarreal have also involved them with their neighboring towns.

It all started kinda crazy with people worried, specially as the first case of the province was in Burriana, a neighboring town. So you can expect from that point on, you had Villarreal’s hospital with TV crews providing constant information about this.

As the virus started spreading around the country, the Valencian football federation postponed the whole season for at least two weeks waiting to see what to do. At the same time, Nules’ town hall decided to hold a meeting to discuss the situation, which also involved sporting clubs. Onda was also started to go on the lockdown mode with their regulations.

When the government decided to do this lockdown for fifteen days (initial plan), people were a bit nervous about the situation with some starting to buy compulsively things like food or toilet paper. If I’m honest, I have never been able to understand why someone sees this lockdown and thinks that one of the very first items to buy is enough toilet paper for two months or more.

Some changes that you see more closely is the police guarding drugstores, the local medical facility or even the supermarket. Talking of them, supermarkets have also started to enforce new rules. Of our chains here, one has workers controlling access into the building with a lot of rules like the distance between customers on the line, and also when on the line for paying; while others work more on the maximum capacity (like only 450 people inside the store) to operate. These policies are being followed around the whole province.

People in the province have been so far very conscious about the situation, respecting the current rules of movement, like only going into the street if it’s necessary, avoiding contact... Maybe the bad note can be said about how the beaches of Xilxes, Moncofa... where the population multiplies in summer, have a lot of people going there. This has been criticized by a lot of people, as this is serious situation and not some holiday. The good side has been the solidarity with the doctors and nurses, as there’s been an informal agreement of at 21:00 showing at the door or through the window to have a round of applause for the healthcare workers and their noble work.

Cases in Castellón province are now more in the low-end of the spectrum, with I think there is a current of only seven cases reported. Besides the first one in Burriana, there’s been talk of the other ones being also from Burriana, from Castellón, or the last two from La Vall d’Uixó.

We think we can win this virus, we feel we can win this virus, we will win this virus.