From nursing homes in France to hospitals in Poland, older Europeans and the workers who care for them rolled up their sleeves on Sunday to receive coronavirus vaccine shots in a campaign to inoculate more than 450 million people across the European Union.

The inoculations offered a rare respite as the continent struggles with one of its most precarious moments since the pandemic began.

Despite national lockdowns, restrictions on movement, shuttering of restaurants and cancellations of Christmas gatherings, the virus has stalked Europe into the dark winter months. The spread of a more contagious variant of the virus in Britain has raised such alarm that much of continental Europe rushed to close its borders to travelers coming from the country, effectively plunging the nation as a whole into quarantine.

“Today, we start turning the page on a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president wrote on Twitter. “The #COVID19 vaccine has been delivered to all EU countries.”

For Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy, the vaccine’s arrival could not come soon enough. Italy’s suffering at the outset of the pandemic served as a warning for the world, and the current death toll is again among the worst in Europe.

“Today Italy reawakens. It’s #VaccineDay,” he wrote on Twitter after a 29-year-old nurse at Rome’s Spallanzani hospital was the first person to be inoculated. “This date will remain with us forever.”

The nurse, Claudia Alivernini, said she hoped the vaccination campaign would signal “the beginning of the end” of the pandemic.

In Spain, a 96-year-old great-grandmother, Araceli Rosario Hidalgo, was the first to receive the vaccine. The Los Olmos nursing home, where she lives, is in Guadalajara,  a city that has a special storage facility where the first doses of the vaccine were delivered on Saturday, transported from Belgium.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on Twitter that the  vaccinations marked “a hopeful new chapter.”

Similar scenes played out across the continent, although not every member of the bloc followed the rollout plans. In Germany, a nursing home in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt jumped the gun, inoculating dozens of residents and staff members on Saturday, hours after the doses arrived. Officials in the Netherlands said they planned to begin vaccinations on Jan. 8.

But all E.U. member nations now have a supply of vaccine on hand to distribute.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/27/world/covid-19-coronavirus-updates

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Advances in having a covid-19 vaccine available are getting closer. Despite the few months of research, some laboratories are at a very advanced stage and the first doses could arrive very soon .

The executive vice-president of Research and Development in Oncology at AstraZeneca, the Catalan doctor Josep Baselga , explained in an interview with El món on RAC1 that in a few weeks several pharmacists could have a first vaccine ready.

According to Baselga, right now, 175 vaccines are being developed worldwide , all different. Of these, 35 are in clinical trials with patients and ten are in final stages.

Both AstraZeneca and two or three other companies could have results by the end of this month or, at the latest, in December .

There are currently four vaccines in phase three. From now until the end of the year it is very likely that one, two or three will already have the results. These vaccines work, generate antibodies and a cellular immunity against the virus. We are talking about November or, at most, the end of the year.

Availability will be so fast because AstraZeneca made the decision to start manufacturing thousands of doses before having the final results.

A relatively normal summer - the Executive Vice President of Research and Development in Oncology AstraZeneca believes that once you get the vaccine still cost back to normal, but predicts that the situation will begin to relax.

We will never return to the normality of what we had until now, but in the summer we will be able to have a relatively normal life. We will have a horrible winter, they are having a very hard month, but at the beginning of the year the situation will start to change and we will be able to move forward.

https://www.rac1.cat/programes/el-mon/20201102/49160676124/josep-baselga-vacuna-astrazeneca-immunitat-farmaceutica-anticossos-monoclonals.html

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The Spanish-owned Room Mate chain of boutique hotels has become the first hotel chain to offer its guests free Covid-19 tests.

Guests will be tested on arrival or can choose to take a free antigen test before travelling at any of around 100 clinics across Spain run by Quirón, Room Mate’s partner in the scheme. The hotel will then use an app to track guests’ symptoms during their stay. Long-stay guests and hotel staff will be tested every three to five days.

The antigen test produces results within 15 minutes, compared with 48 hours for the more costly PCR “gold-standard” test used by the UK government, where samples have to be sent off to a lab.

The scheme will be piloted in four Room Mate hotels in Spain – in Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga and Granada – and will then be extended to the company’s 28-strong chain of hotels around the world.

“Right now, our priority is the health of our guests,” said chief executive Kike Sarasola. “My employees will have the comfort of knowing they are working a safe environment, as will our clients.”

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/oct/01/spanish-hotel-group-to-offer-guests-free-covid-testing

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Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit will begin mid-stage trials of its COVID-19 vaccine in Spain on Monday, the programme’s lead investigator said.

Alberto Borobia said 190 people would take part in the country’s trials, which will take place in three hospitals and be concluded by Sept. 22.

The Spanish study is part of mid-stage, or Phase II, trials of the vaccine that are being carried out in three countries, also including the Netherlands and Germany. The trials in the three countries will last two months and include 550 participants in total.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-vaccine/jj-unit-to-start-mid-stage-covid-19-vaccine-trials-in-spain-idUSL8N2GA0NA

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Spain said on Saturday it would allow in British tourists from Sunday without requiring them to spend two weeks in quarantine, opening up to one of its largest tourism markets after the hit from the coronavirus pandemic.

But as much as Spain wants to welcome British tourists, the UK’s current quarantine measures, requiring a two-week period of self-isolation for most people entering the country from abroad, may well put off some potential travellers.

Britain is due to review its 14-day quarantine rule on June 29, three weeks after it was introduced.

“We will allow British visitors to enter Spain just like the rest of the European Union or Schengen area from 21 June freely and without the need for the quarantine,” foreign minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya told BBC News.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-britain/spain-to-allow-britons-to-visit-from-sunday-without-quarantine-idUSKBN23R0QU

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Spain’s Health Ministry reported no new deaths from the new coronavirus on Monday, with the total death toll unchanged from Sunday at 27,127, the health ministry said.

It said the total number of COVID-19 infections increased by 71 from Sunday to 239,638.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-tally/spain-reports-no-new-covid-19-deaths-71-new-cases-idUSKBN2382YW

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Up to a million Spanish families could soon receive an ongoing monthly payment to help them through the coronavirus crisis as the country’s government looks set to approve a €3 billion ($A5 billion) basic income scheme.

The program, targeting low or no income families, will likely remain beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, which is expected to push the unemployment rate to more than 20 per cent in the country of almost 47 million people, according to the International Monetary Fund.  

Discussing the measures on local television last month, Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said they were intended to “stay forever, that it becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument.”

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/spain-set-to-introduce-permanent-basic-income-scheme-to-rebuild-economy-post-coronavirus

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Tourists will be able to visit Spain from 1 July without having to quarantine for two weeks.

The government said cabinet ministers made the decision to lift the mandatory coronavirus quarantine during a meeting on Monday.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had already announced over the weekend that Spain was ready to welcome some foreign visitors in July but did not say if they would have to continue to stay in quarantine for two weeks.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-spain-to-welcome-tourists-from-1-july-with-no-quarantine-11994664

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The Spanish Health Ministry agreed on Friday to allow the Madrid region to move to Phase 1 of the country’s four-phase deescalation plan. This stage allows social gatherings of up to 10 people and sidewalk cafés to reopen at 50% capacity.

Health Minister Salvador Illa informed regional health chief, Enrique Ruiz-Escudero, of the decision on Friday morning. Madrid, considered the epicenter of the Covid-19 epidemic in Spain, had twice requested a looser lockdown since May 7, but on both occasions it was told that it failed to meet the requirements set out by health experts.

The central government announced this afternoon what other regions have been given the green light to transition to a new phase of the deescalation plan. With the exception of Valencia, all regional authorities have asked to move partially or completely to the next stage of the deescalation plan.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Illa indicated that all the provinces of Castilla y León, as well as the metropolitan area of Barcelona will move to Phase 1.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-22/spanish-government-will-allow-madrid-region-to-enter-phase-1-of-deescalation-plan.html

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Spain's health ministry has confirmed that the country's latest daily death toll from coronavirus is 48.

The daily figure rose from 83 on Tuesday to 95 on Wednesday but this marks the first time it has dipped below 50 since 16 March, having peaked at 950 on 2 April.

The ministry said that the number of confirmed cases had risen by 482 to 233,037, with Spain's cumulative death toll now 27,940.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain/spains-daily-covid-19-death-toll-at-48-excluding-catalonia-idUSKBN22X1YY

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