Europe barricades borders to slow coronavirus

The spiralling coronavirus epidemic tore into the fabric of Europe on Tuesday, prompting its leaders to all but wall the continent off from the rest of the world and erect barriers within it, and to throttle back or turn off the engines of ordinary life and livelihoods in hopes of slowing the deadly spread.

The European Union banned nonessential travel from outside the bloc into 26 nations stretching from Portugal to Finland, home to more than 400 million people, for 30 days, as Europe’s leaders grudgingly, belatedly accepted that being at the heart of a global pandemic and trying to fight it will mean severe social and economic hardship.

The move by Brussels was just the most dramatic on a day full of evidence that European life was abruptly becoming more atomised and constrained than anything in Europe’s modern history outside wartime.

Russia announced that it would bar most foreigners from entering starting Wednesday, and Britain and Germany urged their people not to travel abroad. Spain, hit by one of the worst outbreaks, closed its land borders to keep from exporting the virus, and several European countries barred travellers from there.

The virus continued to chip away at the European Union’s core mission: integrating its member nations into a tightly woven whole and erasing barriers to the movement of people and goods. The number of countries re-erecting long-eliminated border checks with their neighbours rose to 12 on Tuesday, a new hitch in the flow of commerce.

“We have a lot of traffic jams of lorries transporting goods,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the administrative branch of the bloc. “The flow of goods has to be swift. We need these goods for the functioning of the internal market.”

Spain and France joined Italy in prohibiting residents from leaving their homes except for necessities. Belgium announced that it would do so beginning Wednesday, in addition to banning outbound flights for at least two weeks.

Parisians fled for the countryside in droves Tuesday morning ahead of the noon start of the French lockdown, and the interior minister, Christophe Castaner, warned that people would face fines of $42 to $150 for acts as simple as stopping on a sidewalk to chat with friends.

“Staying at home today and in the coming days means saving lives,” Castaner said at a news conference. “Behind each handshake, each kiss, each group meeting, there are more victims, there are more deaths.”

Ukraine banned public gatherings, ordered businesses closed and shut down airline, train, bus and subway services. After the Orthodox Church in Greece refused to halt services voluntarily, the government — having already shut down schools, bars, restaurants and beaches — ordered it to stop. It also told most stores to stay closed starting Wednesday.

“The protection of public health requires clear decisions,” said Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister.

Even in countries like Britain, where avoiding public gatherings remains government advice, not a dictate, there was a realisation that it could cost people their jobs, their wages, their businesses, even their homes.

Laboratory-confirmed coronavirus infections in Europe, which are climbing by more than 9,000 per day, passed 70,000 on Tuesday, with more than 3,300 deaths, and experts warned that many other cases have not been detected yet.

In Spain, the regional governments of the Balearic and Canary island chains, whose economic lifeblood is tourism, pleaded with Madrid to halt flights to them, and the leader of the Balearics, Francina Armengol, urged about 25,000 tourists there to take the first flights home.

National leaders promised extraordinary interventions in economies that seemed to be careening into recession, in the harshest test of governments’ ability to keep things afloat since the 2008 financial crisis, if not much longer.

Bruno Le Maire, France’s economy and finance minister, said the government would not hesitate to buy big stakes in major companies, or even nationalise them, if that is needed to keep them from collapsing. He announced a financial relief package worth about $50 billion, and more than $300 million in loans for businesses.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, whose government has already nationalised private hospitals in response to the crisis, proposed an extraordinary $220 billion rescue package for individuals and businesses. That is equivalent to about 16 percent of the country’s economy.

The European Union was considering ditching its notoriously stringent fiscal rules that impose hard limits on member governments’ deficits.

Italy, by far the hardest-hit country in Europe, reported Tuesday that it had confirmed more than 31,500 coronavirus infections and 2,500 deaths, figures exceeded only by China. Spain topped 11,000 cases, France and Germany each rose past 7,000, and two smaller countries, Switzerland and Norway, reported infection rates that, relative to their populations, were even higher.

The death of Spain’s youngest victim, Francisco García, 21, a soccer coach from Málaga, struck a particular chord around the country. He had recently gone to a hospital with what initially seemed to be pneumonia, according to local media reports, and doctors found that he had both the coronavirus and previously undiagnosed leukemia. He died Sunday.

Leaders of the European Union countries, after meeting by teleconference for three hours Tuesday, agreed to the ban on most visitors from outside the region, setting out on a long stretch of isolation unlike anything in recent European history.

Exceptions will be made for European citizens and residents coming home, although some countries were asking them to self-isolate for two weeks, in some cases away from their families. Medical professionals and scientists will also be exempt.

European leaders had hoped that Britain, which left the bloc in January, would participate in the action, but it did not. As a result, Ireland, a European Union member that has a passport-free travel agreement with Britain, was not covered by the policy.

“The UK is not planning on implementing external border restrictions,” von der Leyen said, “and of course, this then goes for Ireland too.”

The travel limits agreed to Tuesday were the first major coordinated response to the coronavirus epidemic by the European Union, the world’s wealthiest and most integrated club of countries. Until now, governments have pursued widely differing measures to slow down the virus at home, at times blaming one another for its spread.

The European move puts additional pressure on the British government which has come under some criticism for taking a more lax approach to the crisis than many of its neighbours.

London began toughening its tactics on Monday, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson told people to keep their distance from one another and to stay away from public gathering places — though the measures are voluntary and schools remain open. On Tuesday, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, advised British citizens against all nonessential travel worldwide for an initial period of 30 days.

Much of the European Union was initially resistant to curbing travel. But formalising continentwide restrictions became necessary, European officials said, as major countries like the United States advised their citizens to avoid Europe, and as European countries told their own citizens to avoid neighbouring nations.

“A big topic today were, of course, also internal borders and consequently the blockages there,” von der Leyen said.

The imminent suspension of travel set off a series of efforts to bring Europeans home and send tourists away.

Germany plans to spend about $55 million repatriating thousands of German tourists scattered around the globe, its foreign minister said on Tuesday.

“We will do everything possible to make it possible for the thousands of Germans stranded abroad to return to Germany in the coming days,” said Heiko Maas, the foreign minister.

He urged Germans already at home to stay there.

As a practical matter, the European Union lockdown will be up to each country to put in place; the bloc does not have the ability to enforce it. Each member state would be able to tweak the restrictions on whom it might allow in, and under what conditions.

“It’s up to them now to implement,” von der Leyen said. “They said they will immediately do that. ”

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