Children in Spain relish outdoor hour as lockdown eases

The sound of children shouting and the rattle of bikes on the pavement after the 44-day seclusion of Spain’s youngest citizens offered a first taste of a gradual return to normal life in the country. Those figures are widely believed to understate the true toll of the pandemic, due to limited testing, problems in counting the dead and some governments’ moves to underplay their outbreaks. Disaster Response Force personnel disinfect a containment zone in Hyderabad, India (Mahesh Kumar A./AP)All have reported significant progress in bringing down infection rates and are ready, warily, to start giving their citizens more freedom. “Maximum caution will be our guideline for the rollback,” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said Saturday as he announced that Spaniards will be allowed to leave their homes for short walks and exercise starting on May 2. People wearing face masks at a ceremony in Kyiv, Ukraine, to remember the Chernobyl tragedy (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)Authorities recommend that parents and children wash their hands before and after outings. It follows weeks of work by experts on how to find a balance between restarting the eurozone’s second-largest economy and preventing a second wave of infections that could overwhelm intensive care units. People wearing protective face masks watch a fight in Nicaragua (Alfredo Zuniga/AP)Italy’s prime minister Giuseppe Conte is expected to announce more details easing the lockdown in the coming days for the first European country to see a large-scale coronavirus outbreak. Mr Conte told the La Repubblica publication that priorities would include restarting construction and export industries so that businesses would not “risk being cut out” of markets. “A European race to be the first to allow tourist trips again would lead to unacceptable risks,” foreign minister Heiko Maas told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. A man collect supplies over barbed wire in the coronavirus locked down area of Selayang Baru, Malaysia (Vincent Thian/AP)That was an apparent reference to ski resorts such as Ischgl in Austria, where dozens of tourists were infected and carried the virus as far away as Iceland and Norway.