spain's prime minister, pedro sanchez, has banned people from leaving home apart from for specific purposes, including to buy essential supplies and medicines and for work. it comes as his wife maria is tested positive for covid—19. france has brought in strict measures after seeing a sharp rise in infections. prime minister edouard philippe says non—essential public places will shut from midnight, including cafes, restaurants, cinemas and most shops. as many people as possible are being asked to work from home. the united states is tightening its travel restrictions as it tries to limit the spread of covid—19. a flight ban on europe's schengen travel zone has been extended to cover britain and ireland, while vice—president mike pence has said that internal travel restrictions are being considered.

now on bbc news, it's time for dateline. hello, and welcome to dateline london. i'm carrie gracie. this week, the new coronavirus is now a pandemic, and its epicentre has moved from china to europe. people are dying in large numbers — in italy of course, but as infections soar, now in spain and france too. beyond europe, other countries are also in big trouble — iran still, but also the united states. africa and south america are now seeing a scattering of cases. and with many governments moving to close borders and ban mass gatherings, the global economy is at risk. my guests today: iain martin

of the times, author thomas kielinger, political analyst eunice goes, and political commentator and broadcaster jonathan sacerdoti. welcome to you all. let's start with the question of europe. i'm going to leave this open to all four of you, who wants to be first in answering? do we think that europe missed a trick in not taking me draconian measures that we have seen, notjust in china, but also be quite fast measures we have seen in taiwan, singapore, japan, hong kong? possibly. i think possibly, asia and hong kong particularly it was a very quick, they were closing down schools. testing a lot of people. perhaps that has prevented the spread of the disease, but europe, that was not as quick, but there are other characteristics.

europe is a much more open continent in the sense that the movement across nations, the movement from all different parts of the world, so europe is, to a large extent, more exposed than those asian countries. populations are also less obedient to authority, so that perhaps also has had an impact on the response, but everything else is just conjecture. it is very difficult to know. and we will not know until it is all over our way through the next phase of it because this could be a very long running experience with various peaks and there is not a vaccine yet, which is the key thing, that is the only thing which is ultimately going to end the crisis. which is health, social and economic, which is the appearance of the virus. it is difficult to know because two or three weeks ago, even just two weeks ago when we were discussing this on your show, it still then seemed quite a long way to go. —— long way away.

in european terms it seemed like a far—off news story, other than that it was starting to take off in italy. and it was difficult to make that calculation. should the authorities have closed down the european economy three or four weeks ago and gone effectively into lockdown or gone into something closer to the draconian restrictions of the kind of hong kong? it is difficult to know. and we will only know when the numbers are there at the end. i suppose some viewers, whether they are in hong kong, taiwan, singapore, perhaps not so much the singaporeans, but the taiwanese and hong kongers, they are open societies, liberal, they do not regard themselves as authoritarian societies, but we saw sars in 2003 and we got prepared for this. europe has open borders and so forth, which would suggest that because we are in such a location we have to be doubly careful, but as governments even now are saying that we must not act

too draconically too early. if we picked up signs of this disease from asia and began to introduce those similar measures, the populace at large would say we were overreacting. the virus might notjump across the continent so quickly. it is very well to say after the event we were too slow, but i do not think the population would have followed the government's lead in clamping down early. even now we see the british government saying we must be careful not to expend our best efforts too early. we want to wait for the peak and then be fully prepared. so there is a judgment call to be made here, when you react. it also sounds as if thomas is saying, jonathan, that there is a question of taking the public with you and they have to almost, there is a sombre way of putting it, the severity of it has to be seen through deaths in order to make alert and make

vigilant everybody. south korea took a slightly different approach to italy and they both seem to have had very serious outbreaks at about the same time, but south korean cases are now going down while italian cases are not. i think there are a few things at play that i have been thinking about over this period and one of them is this comparison of how different countries are behaving, obviously they are dictated by different governments and different cultural norms in those countries, but also there is an enormous temptation within each country, we are doing it here in the uk, and see around the world government doing it, to say that we are doing the bestjob. you hear certain countries saying, our leader is taking the best the toughest steps, and there are those in each country who will be critical of whatever the government does because they do not like that government. when it comes to this virus, it knows no borders, it knows no nationalities, it knows no class, it knows no elite. we are seeing world leaders catching

it, doctors catching it, ordinary citizens, young and old catching catching it. younger people are still suffering from it quite badly in certain places. there's so much that we don't know about it and i think that also, the other aspect of this is unintended consequences. when you country introduces extremely tough measures, they know what they are trying to do in terms of the epidemiology, but they don't necessarily know what it is going to do to their economy, to the mental health of the population, to the longer term planning for whether it is the economy, the health of the nation, the attitude of the nation, the culture of the nation, survivability, whether there will be a second wave in their country, their neighbouring country, there's so much that we don't know that i think the most important message that i have is that people should, but and large, follow the advice of the experts in their governments, and if they want to supplement that with more action, perhaps people here in the uk choosing to isolate themselves a little bit more than told to, go ahead. "follow the advice of your scientific experts and your governments,"

but advice differs. talk us through the uk advice. there is talk of herd immunity. the british are taking a slightly different approach and it is not the case that the british are completely out there on their own, but it is difficult, in this outbreak of amateur biology, —— virology, which is off the charts, around the world globally, fuelled by social media, all manner of people are sharing information, some of it correct, some of it from dubious sources, and forming their own judgments and shouting loudly on social media that one theory is correct and the other is wrong. in british terms, they have concluded that it is better to try and flatten out the peak by doing this gradually, and the peak of this will come somewhere between the next month and ten weeks or so and that you do not go draconian too early,

and you try and encourage a situation in which large numbers of people accept that large numbers of people are going to get this, and will experience the symptoms in a mild way, and then at correct moments advise different measures. they are using the phrase "cocooning" about older britons and, at some point, you can expect the advice to change, if the numbers ability of, for people to self—isolate. this is an enormous political gamble, more importantly than that, it is a huge gamble with people's health and the experts are not in agreement. then again, experts are not in agreement anywhere in the world. i think there is one problem that people have some difficulty in understanding, this whole idea of herd immunity. in what way is it going to flatten out the number of cases over a short period of time when nothing is being done to prevent people from catching it? the chief medical officer said that we might have, at the moment, around 10,000 people

in the united kingdom who are infected with the illness. the nhs is no longer testing people. people who think that they have the symptoms. only if the are already quite ill. if this is happening, we are essentially opening the nhs hospitals to receive, all of a sudden, quite a lot of cases, rather than people isolating themselves and protecting themselves from catching the virus. and we will not talk about in the uk in detail any more. i want to spend a few moments talking about the united states, which having ta ken a fairly laidback approach initially, president trump declared a state of emergency. i think the us is a case of the chief executive, the president, not taking it seriously early enough and then suddenly waking up and slamming a hugely dangerous ban on flights to the us, which i consider totally unreasonable.

except that many european countries have also closed their borders. yes, but this is a different kind of border, the atlantic. the traffic from europe to america is central to business the world over, particularly to americans and to europeans. and for him to not consult beforehand, or at least allow passengers and travellers to bring a medical certificate that they are free from the virus, i think is the peak of unreason. you might have to call in, but i need to be careful, he is at the epicentre of unreason, the president. it isa it is a blanket ban and a huge threat to the world economy. the interesting part was that press conferences, where he had always captains of industry behind him. i think that was quite clear on trumpet 's think that was quite clear on trumpet '5 part. going from a position where many thought he had not done enough, behind—the—scenes he showed he had swung into action and got google, walmart, drug

testing companies, to totally overhaul the system so they can act much faster. and that's the american way, the trump of ways to say private industry is going to help us get out of this and at the secondary effect of that is to stimulate the economy, which is also suffering badly at this moment. it had that effect slightly. so i think it is an interesting approach is up again, we cannot know if it is right or wrong. when the stock market went down,... but it went up again. he even tweeted out the rise in the stock market while he was speaking, which is idiotic. you are in the middle of something which is similar to the wall street crash and i think... so are you echoing thomas? who knows where politics will be in six months, but i think this is the week that finished donald trump. to move from a position, and unfortunately he is still in office, tojust a couple of weeks ago he was saying it isjust the flu, they say it goes away in april, and you look at the chaos in the administration

and read the accounts of how the national address and they did not know what they were going to say, and bits of it were ad—libbed and freestyled, this is a moment when leaders, the fate of leaders is decided because human beings — it is a very old—fashioned human instinct, look for leadership. they know that not everything can be fixed. but they look to the white house and want to see that that person is what they are doing, and that was not the message this week. one of the consequences of such a huge story is that other important news gets neglected. so i'd like to pause the pandemic discussion for a few moments and let each of you tell me which news story you'd have liked us to talk about on today's programme if the virus wasn't happening. jonathan, you have 90 seconds to two minutes. i think the death of lance—corporal brodie gillen is something we should have seen more of any news.

she was a british soldier serving in iraq who died in those rocket strikes on the allied camps and normally we do not necessarily hear in britain of the death of every soldier and hear the names and i think that's a shame, especially now as that is sweeping the world in another way, but there are still people fighting for this country, fighting for the west and there are still people fighting against a tyrannical iran, which itself is suffering from coronavirus, and i think it was important to remember her, herfamily, herfriends and have our thoughts with him at this difficult moment. i will not give each of you a chance to come back on but, i want you talking about your preferred stories. thomas, what do you think we are neglecting? i think we're neglecting, hugely, the subject that was dominating everything else are not so long ago, brexit, the transition period. we are in the middle of the transition period, and by the end of 2020 britain will finally have left. and hopefully we'll have a deal.

nothing very much is happening along that front, except the negotiations are hampered by the problem of gathering to many people and too many groups in various locations, so that is going to have a negative effect on the progress of the negotiations. if we do not have a sort of prospectus by june, borisjohnson has been saying that there would be a positive outcome, he may declare game over. that's not possible to be said under the current circumstances, so my suggestion, or my prediction is that we will see a lengthening, a postponement of the transition period, which cannot end in december. when so little has been happening. we might be going to 2021 a which leaves a huge credibility gap by the prime minister here, how does he explain to the public? some huge predictions here. julian

brexit, the end of trump. what story do you think we are collecting? the refugee crisis. that reopened when president erdogan decided to open the greek and turkish border, and we saw the greek police reacted to those thousands of refugees. they were welcomed with tear gas. and the inaction of europe. europe so far has congratulated greece, and said that we are protecting our borders. they are having very strong talks with erdogan, but where is the solidarity? we are talking about thousands of — over 150,000 children greek refugee camps and in turkey who are extremely vulnerable, vulnerable also to coronavirus. we also letting the weakest economies of europe, we're talking about greece and italy, those who are at the epicentre of the refugee crisis in europe, and where is the european solidarity to tackle this crisis? just a very quick word

on afghanistan and what's happening with the taliban, which i think would be a big story globally if we weren't all diverted. it's only a few weeks since a deal was signed that was essentially supposed to bring the conflict to an end, and america is the start of a complete drawdown of its 40,000 troops. and we learned this week through evidence in congress that the deal is already being flouted by the taliban, and that attacks are continuing. so this is a conflict which the americans and other countries in the west have spent more than $2 trillion on fighting for the last 19 years, and it turns out that, at the us is leaving afghanistan, the taliban is effectively reasserting itself. i had ihada i had a footnote to what you said about the refugees. what i worry is about the look we have in the conflict between turkey and europe. nobody talks about russia. the real perpetrator of this crisis putin,

who keeps bombing those areas of syria, creating more refugees. so we should concentrate on russia more. and at that point we're going to back to our coronavirus discussion. the last time we saw a global financial crisis, we saw the world's leaders trying to come together to sort it out in a coordinated way. iain, you were talking about the economic impacts, and jonathan. iain, why don't you pick up on this. we've had a tumultuous week on the markets, with the worst day since 1987 on thursday, a little bit of a recovery on friday, some of them. but global impacts, if you look at business, some of them are really in an existential crisis as a result of this. that's absolutely right. i think that that has been part of the equation that governments are struggling with — what to prioritise. so you prioritise the economy and people say you're heartless

and you don't care about human life. but if you prioritise extreme measures designed, at least, to look as if you are protecting human life in the here and now, a, they may have a knock—on effect later on if there is a second wave and human life may suffer, literally, if the economy does suffer, so i think in terms of that, there is the psychological, epidemiological, economical dots all of these considerations and that is, i think, as we said, strong and good leadership is necessary. even if we do not think that our leaders in necessarily doing the right thing, as long as we believe that they have an informed, scientific, considered strategy, i think that as a society we need to pull together a bit and the support of their choices, rather than try to undermine them, cast out and cause chaos because then we will never know if the strategy would have worked.

and iain, you talked about leadership, but have we got enough coordinated leadership of leaders coming together? globally, i suppose economically, to rescue the global economy, we need global planning. two bits — there's good news and bad news on the economy. the good news is that, after an event like this, it should be the case that the bounce back economically will be very rapid, because human beings are social animals, want to get back out there. people want to feed their families, people want to get markets moving again. the bad news is that, unlike a conventional financial crisis, where you know that all you need to do is assemble sufficient firepower to say to the markets, we've got this, and you restore confidence, and back it comes. unfortunately, in this case, we don't know how it is going to last. we don't know whether it's

a three—month—long or year—long issue, until a vaccine is found. i think this is much worse, actually. because it is longer lasting. if you think the price of oil since january, which is effectively down 50%, which is good in terms of petrol at the pumps, but points to a massive fall in global economic activity. what is happening to the us bond market, it is notjust about stock prices. underneath the surface, the wiring of the economy, the banking system, is struggling to cope. the good news is that the us fed, us authorities, and also the bank of england do seem to understand the scale of it. not quite so sure that the ecb do. look out for the eurozone, where i think there are serious problems coming done the line. it is an old story, once you get into something like this, businesses get distressed,

the people who work for them get stressed and we are experiencing enormous changes in global patterns of change, behaviour, and global consumption, and it's going to be tough for people. the priority for governments is going to be had for helping people through this because a lot of people imagines and not have a huge amount of savings and you're going to have to see governments in the next few weeks start to illustrate to people how they can support them through this difficult period. i think in europe, this is going to be — the need for a coordinated action is absolutely urgent. and so far, that coordinated action has been found wanting. if we think about the intervention of the president of the ecb this week, christine lagarde, it was pretty disastrous in terms of not reassuring markets about would the ecb be there to help the italian economy, which are suffering tremendously? we heard yesterday the german government announcing a big bazooka to help german businesses, so any help that they might want. the french government has made similar announcements in terms

of opening the coffers to help all the businesses that will be affected by the coronavirus. but what about the smaller economies of the euro zone? they are bound by the euro zone governance rules. they need to keep an eye on their deficits and public debts. if we had ecb saying that italy, it's not ourjob to keep them in the euro, it's not a job to keep portugal or any other vulnerable euro zone country in the euro, that is very, very serious. and i really hope there's going to be far more coordinated action, because the impact of this on european economies is going to be absolutely catastrophic. and can we just, in the last couple of minutes that we have, can we talk about some of the psychological and social costs? because they're less visible than the immediate economic ones, but they are the inevitable knock—on, if people don't have jobs,

incomes, the money to pay their rent, or keep their business going. thomas, what about that, the social cost of all of this? well, before we get to the social cost, you have the financial cost to begin with, and you have to coordinate a good dose of individual countries will have to at home before the coordinate. so if you look at germany and the huge opening of the coffers, that is a positive sign, because germany has been accused of sitting on their balance budgets policy and suddenly it has all the time. the crisis has led to great generosity. and in england also, after years of austerity, the spending of public money. you have to strengthen your efforts on that front to make available healthcare workers who would be ready to come and deal with those who suffer most from the lack of attention. so that is part of the... a huge challenge for each

individual country. i think in terms of the social cost, as well, it's absolutely the case that we are thinking a lot more at the moment about isolated people, like the elderly and the vulnerable. that's one of the reasons that the british prime minister chose not to suggest that they isolate themselves yet. he said he wants to protect them during the high—risk peak moment. people are wondering how they can check on their neighbours, bring food around, check their neighbours. maybe we should do more of this all the time, not just when there's an international health crisis. we can do things like the silver line helpline, we should think notjust in terms of herd immunity, but in terms of behaviour as a society. so i suppose that is a long time, but we need to be doing that right

now to protect people from isolation. so i just want to close, we've only got a few moments left, by asking what is your personal preoccupation at this moment in this crisis? jonathan, let's start with you. i kind of wanted to ask about the mental health impacts of the anxiety, and so on. because obviously for people who have ocd and wash their hands a lot anyway, this particular moment, when every moment of every day that message is being driven home to them, it potentially takes them into a more difficult space. well, i'm certainly waking up much more anxious these days than i usually do. it had a couple of minutes when i woke up feeling fine and reach of my iphone, looked at the news, and within ten seconds i see a disastrous covid—19 story.

a lot of us are germ—phobic and go about washing your hands anyway, and have an immunosuppressed family. it may have an effect on people are already quite anxious. it is having a slight effect for me and anxiety. i am also waking up far anxious and i really worry about the length of this crisis — for how long are we going to end this crisis environment questioning how long is it sustainable for us to keep our sanities? i worry about friends and family, as well as the economic impact. but also, really, focusing on understanding that we've lived quite through decking decadent area. a lot of things we've taken for granted — leisure, travel — and what really matters is those people, those friends, those connections. we have a community organisation in parts of london when i live and that is something very helpful to me. i wake up and find a little later, a piece of paper thrown into my letterbox saying, call this and that person in your neighbourhood, make yourself available if someone has difficulties, cannot access food and so forth. and that's wonderfully positive.

indeed, and to end on a positive note, we could all show leadership in our own community. that's it for dateline london for this week. we're back next week, same place, same time. thank you to all of you, and thank you to all of you for watching. goodbye. the changeable weather is going to continue through the rest of the weekend. we've had rain in the last 24 weekend. we've had rain in the last 2a hours. there's more rainfall in the way. some of us will get the rain in the morning on sunday. others in the afternoon, and some of us others in the afternoon, and some of us in the evening. so it depends really where you are in the uk. this is what it looks like through the early hours of sunday, so rain spreading into parts of wales, the midlands too, also some rain continuing across parts of scotland,

and here cold enough for a little bit of winter arenas across the hills. but not cold across central and southern parts of the uk. temperature around nine or 10 degrees. and watch the rain as it moves degrees. and watch the rain as it m oves a cross degrees. and watch the rain as it moves across the country through the morning, lunchtime, and then into the afternoon. actually, for most of us, most of the time, it is going to be dry on sunday, and there will be some sunshine around as well, particularly across western and central areas. chilly in the north, but in the south, temperatures will still hold onto double figures. and then towards the end of sunday, i think most of the rainfall will died away. —— will have died away.

welcome to bbc news. i'm maryam moshiri. our top stories: spain introduces strict new emergency measures as it's announced the wife of the prime minister has the coronavirus. a partial lockdown has come into effect in france. restaurants, cafes, cinemas and nightclubs and all non—essential businesses have closed. hello and welcome to bbc news. european countries are continuing to take extraordinary steps to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus. measures on a scale not seen before in peace—time are coming

into force.