50 days after being quarantined inside our houses we were allowed to go outside today for “Fase 0” of the de-escalation plan. Starting at 6am people started hitting the streets to get back to running, biking, anything really – outside. Freedom! Of course this didn’t come without some rules and guidelines. To be honest, the guidelines are a bit complicated. However, the country definitely needs to have some rules in place to avoid total chaos; my question is to what extent people are going to follow the rules. And judging from what we’ve seen during the day I think there’s going to need to be some order to keep things under control and prevent a second phase of the virus.

The rules:

6-10 am People 14 years and older can exercise outside, individually or people can go for walks, max of 2 people and not more than a Km. But the exercise can be for more than a km, as long as you don’t cross your town line.

10am-12pm People older than 70 years old can go out for a wlk

12-7pm Kids can go outside, accompanied by one adult (for up to 3 kids) and for an hour max, within a radius of 1km (same rule we’ve had since last week for the kids, but now there’s a time range)

7-8pm People older than 70 can hit the streets again

8-11pm Sports time again.

And… I’m done. Not exactly simple.

I wasn’t out at 6am, but a bit before 9 I headed out for a long run in the nearby forest/mountain area that I hadn’t been to in a while. It was great (despite the fact that I probably won’t be able to walk tomorrow), and more or less people were respectful and following the rules. In just that small space and amount of time I did see quite a few people exercising with more than one person (not allowed) and some not totally maintaining distances. My husband went out with his bike at 8pm and more or less the same thing during the evening round. I guess time will tell.

Actually I really shouldn’t be one to talk. It turns out I broke the rules as well. I didn’t realize that the mountain area where I went for a run crossed a town line – oops. Fortunately the police weren’t monitoring the mountain…