MADRID, March 26 (Xinhua) -- It is a bright and sunny spring morning in the Spanish capital city of Madrid, with a light breeze bringing a touch of crispness to the spring air. If it were a normal day, people would be out taking a morning stroll and having a midday drink watching the world go by...
However, it is far from a normal day, with Madrid in its 12th day of a lockdown that will last until April 12 at the earliest. Life has been turned upside down by the novel coronavirus.
Few capital cities have been affected as hard as Madrid by the coronavirus, with over 14,500 confirmed cases and 1,825 deaths by Wednesday.
The city's massive IFEMA exhibition center has been turned into a 5,500-bed field hospital, and an ice rink inside a shopping mall has been turned into a makeshift mortuary because funeral parlors can't cope with the mounting number of victims.
Feng, who has worked in Madrid for a foreign news service for more than a decade, said she was "frustrated" hearing that the ice rink, close to her residence, was turned into a makeshift morgue.
"The area near the ice rink was so prosperous and full of people in the past. How can we go and play there in the future? We can't face it," she said.
Madrid, a city where social life was usually in the street, has swapped the pavement and the park for the sofa and the balcony, where every night at 8 p.m., almost everyone stands to applaud health service workers risking their lives to keep them safe.
Oscar, who works at the Ramon y Cajal hospital, said the work is extremely stressful as everyone is worried about catching the virus.
"I suffer from some allergies, and a couple of days ago, I sneezed in an office and they shouted at me 'go outside' in case I was infectious," said Oscar, who takes every possible precaution to keep safe.
"I wash my hands all the time; I wash them when I leave home, when I arrive at work, when I am at work, when I leave work and when I get back home. My skin is starting to look like a crocodile's skin," Oscar joked.
With the economy coming to a virtual stop, most companies have imposed a temporary regulation of employment on their workers, effectively idling them on 75 percent of their full pay.
Javier, who works for a television company, told Xinhua he wasn't disturbed by the measure. "I'm getting paid 75 percent of my salary to do nothing," he said.
In contrast, Rocio, who works for a car manufacturer, said she was worried by the measure, because the car industry was already suffering from falling sales, and she wasn't sure what could happen in the medium term.
She is, however, relieved not to have to go to work every day and feels a lot safer at home.
Alvaro, who sells insurance for a bank, is currently working from home. But as the business dwindled under lockdown, he and her wife could spend as much time with their young son, playing with him on the patio in the warm weather.
"Nobody is really interested in buying insurance at the moment," said Alvaro, "we all have other things on our mind."
