How Spain’s coronavirus outbreak got so bad so fast — and how Spaniards are trying to cope #2
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How Spain’s coronavirus outbreak got so bad so fast — and how Spaniards are trying to cope #2

Entrevista realizada por Alex Ward para Vox (Estados Unidos). Marzo, 2020.

After a slow response from the government and the public, Spaniards now say “I will resist.”

Ellen Hietsch made quite a life for herself in Spain over the last three years.

She and her boyfriend would walk together in Madrid’s parks. She’d wake up certain mornings regretting the money she spent at bars. And when it was time to work, she enjoyed teaching English to her young students at Colegio Madrigal.

Amidst the fun, the 25-year-old Pennsylvanian expat kept an eye on the news. Watching Italy struggle to contain its coronavirus outbreak gave her pause, she said, but she “never thought something like that would happen over here.”

But it did.

Spain now has the world’s fourth-largest Covid-19 outbreak and is second only to Italy in all of Europe. To stop the spread, the government — slow at first to respond to the crisis — imposed a country-wide lockdown last Saturday.

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