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| - Hundreds of Athens restaurant owners on Wednesday publicly handed over their keys to the state in a protest against an ongoing coronavirus shutdown. "We are suffocating," read a banner put up by the restaurant owners' union Poese, which represents some 80,000 businesses nationwide. "It's a symbolic movement to show that government (support) measures are insufficient," union secretary Yiorgos Kourassis told AFP, as business owners put keys in a box. The union plans to present them to the prime minister in the coming days. Greece's development minister earlier this month sparked a row with the unionists by offering to personally accept the keys. "I was commenting on an exaggeration... it was a sarcastic statement," the minister, Adonis Georgiadis later said. Food establishments have been allowed to operate via takeout and delivery, but not all have been able to adapt. Nikos Angelissoulis, who owns a grill restaurant in central Athens, said he had lost 40 percent of his income since the first nationwide lockdown was imposed in March, even after switching to food delivery. Over 300,000 people are employed in the Greek restaurant sector, many of them in family businesses, Kourassis said. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Tuesday announced a new tightening of lockdown regulations, hours after the health minister warned that Greece was facing a third wave of the pandemic. Mitsotakis said schools and non-essential shops would be closed from Thursday. Greece's number of cases rose by 1,526 on Tuesday -- jumping from a daily rise of 638 the day before -- with half of the infections in Athens. The country has recorded 6,017 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic. The finance ministry expects to spend 7.5 billion euros ($9.1 billion) this year to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the Greek economy, on top of 24 billion euros spent in 2020. The Greek budget forecasts economic growth of 4.8 percent, scaled back from a prior 7.5-percent estimate. hec/jph/jxb
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