A group of town and cities that make up an automobile cluster in central Romania — including Mioveni, the location of Renault's Dacia car plant and several car parts factories— came under monitoring for quarantine on July 22 as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) infections exceeds the safety threshold under new legislation that just came into force. The cluster also includes the city of Pitesti where most of the workers in the Mioveni plants live and Bascov where other plants in the same industry operate.

The head of the local administration in Arges county where the automobile cluster is located, Emanuel Soare, avoided placing under quarantine the 12 cities and villages that are currently under monitoring. He said that Dacia plant will start its one-month technical outage period in August anyway. 

The economic impact of the sanitary measures tends to be increasingly taken into consideration, and this is not likely to help reduce the number of cases.

As of July 22, only two villages have been placed under quarantine in Romania under the new legislation that came in force the day before, but the situation is deteriorating and threatens the fragile economic recovery.

A large car parts factory in the eastern part of the country, part of YAZAKI group (employing 3,400 people) was not closed yet, although 40 workers were reported as infected. Local administration and company’s management refused to close the factory “to avoid the social impact”.

"We try to spot as quickly as possible and isolate those who pose a potential risk to others. We all seek to make an effort not to suspend the factory's activity, balancing the health and social impacts. We are talking about the largest employer in Braila county. The management of the company collaborated with us, and I have no reason to blame them. We hope things will remain under control. People were scared, too. Yesterday, we had the largest number of people showing up at the County Hospital to be tested, either accusing symptoms, or saying that they were in contact with infected people," said the head of the local administration in Braila county, Catalin Bobic. 

Similar situations resulted in the temporary closure of factories such as the Smithfield meat processing plant recently, but the cost of such steps tends to be taken into account by managers and even local administrations as the economic impact jeopardises their hopes for recovery toward the end of the year.

Romanian authorities reported 1,030 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours as of July 22, a record number for the country since the beginning of the pandemic.

The deterioration was partly caused by certain sanitary measures being declared illegal by the Constitutional Court, which allowed a significant number of people (around 1,000) receiving treatment in hospitals to leave the medical premises and other 4,500 to refuse treatment while no legal means were in place for nearly two weeks to isolate them at home.

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