Cabanas urged American action to support a global response because of a “great risk” the authoritarian governments will be perceived as handling the pandemic better than democracies.

Spain is also worried that Europe and American efforts to fight the virus will be undercut by a patchy response in Africa, the Middle East and South America. “It's in our interest that we support countries like Iran or Venezuela, irrespective of the nature of the regimes,” Cabanas said, adding that “health is a public good that we should all preserve all over the world.”

Cabanas said it was too early to speculate on when Spain might lift its travel ban against non-EU citizens. The tourism-dependent country wants to lift the ban “as soon as possible,” but only alongside the other 25 European countries implementing identical restrictions. “We cannot do it before we're sure that everybody's safe in coming, and those that are in Spain are safe.”

The Spanish government has been critical of the attitudes of governments in northern Europe including the Netherlands, for their refusal to issue joint bonds to fund EU-wide pandemic responses. EU governments instead settled Thursday night on a system of around $600 billion in emergency credit, that will be made available to governments to support unemployment payments, business loans and other pandemic costs. “Nobody's completely happy with it,” admitted Cabanas.

Spain remains under a national lockdown until at least April 25, with the center-left national government coordinating with 17 regional governments domestically. While that means working with an uncooperative government in Catalonia that has sought to establish an independent republic in recent years, Cabanas said that national coordination was ultimately “much more efficient” than having a different approach in each of its 17 regions.

He said coordination takes place daily between both the prime minister and regional presidents, and ministers and their regional counterparts.