After months of closures, governments are eager to reopen schools and businesses to allow people to get on with their lives. But fresh clusters of infection have seen leaders forced to reimpose restrictions in some hotspots, even as rules are eased elsewhere in the same country.
Beijing re-entered a partial lockdown in mid-June after a new coronavirus outbreak linked to a food market in the Chinese capital, while at least 24 states in the US are pausing or rolling back their reopenings as cases accelerate, amid fears that earlier restrictions were relaxed too fast.
The threshold for imposing new lockdowns as well as their size and scope varies dramatically between countries, from a single building in Italy, to several Rwandan villages, to a community of 200,000 in Spain's northeast and a coastal area of 70,000 in its northwest, to the whole of Israel.
There are hopes this approach could minimize the economic damage resulting from large-scale shutdowns. In Portugal, for example, 19 boroughs on the outskirts of Lisbon have shut down, while the capital's downtown area has continued its reopening, along with the rest of the country.
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The German city of Guetersloh was put back into lockdown after 1,331 workers at its Toennies meat processing factory tested positive for the virus. Germany had few infections elsewhere, and the outbreak caused a sharp rise in the nation's R-number, a value indicating how fast the virus is spreading, according to its center for disease control, the Robert Koch Institute.
Alexander Kekulé, a virology professor and Director of the Institute for Biosecurity Research in Germany, told CNN: "The only strategy we can have is a stamping-out strategy. It's the same thing we do usually when we have new clusters of infections of any novel disease."
He said such moves were the "new normal," but needed to be combined with other measures, such as wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, as well as efficient systems to track and trace outbreaks before case numbers enter the hundreds.
Kekulé said this was about clusters, rather than a second wave.
"We should get used to it," he added. "In many places of the world people are really used to rules, for instance: Mosquito nets. And you can argue that the mosquito net is terrible and will change your whole life -- and it's like everybody argues against masks -- but when you have at the other side a deadly disease, and no real good idea how to survive until the vaccine will come, one day or never, then I think it's the best chance we have."
Guetersloh's lockdown was lifted Monday when a court in the state of North Rhine-Westfalia ruled that the regulation was "no longer compatible with the principle of proportionality and the principle of equal treatment."
Residents reported facing prejudice from the rest of the country, with a T-shirt on sale reading, "Keep a distance, I am from Guetersloh," and CNN affiliate n-tv reporting that people with Guetersloh license plates w
