This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 27th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The American Experience with Shelter-In-place orders or so-called

lockdowns driven by the spread of COVID-19 has been

relatively lax. In Ecuador the lockdown has been a lot closer to what the name ought

to imply and good luck getting non-essential services like refrigerator repair.

Cato's Gabriella Calderon lives in Ecuador we spoke last week.

What's the difference between what Americans think of as a lockdown in a pandemic and your experience?

Well, I think it's worthwhile explaining how different lockdowns can be and what they mean in different countries.

In the case of Ecuador, it has not, first of all, we have a very centralized administration.

So the president quarantined basically the whole country.

It's a mandatory quarantine.

And it includes the suspension of public transportation

throughout the whole country.

You could not cross state lines and this has been in place

since March 17th and it has begun relaxing across the past week.

And this week, Wailkeel, the largest city in the country,

is going into what we call yellow traffic light.

We're using this traffic light system going from red to

yellow to green and it's a way of a system to signal reopening measures. what can be done at every certain stage.

And so about 50 cities, including the largest one in the country, are opening back up again

for business.

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