Europe has crossed the barrier of 30 million contag …

The European continent exceeded thirty million cases of coronavirus this Friday. European Union countries have announced a series of travel restrictions as well as containment measures. According to the mapping of cases carried out by Johns Hopkins University, the countries with the highest number of infections are France with 2,931,350, Italy with 2,373,115, Spain with 2,252,164, Germany with 2,023,778, Poland with 1,422,320, Ukraine with 1,183,963, the Netherlands with 914,376 and Portugal with 528,469.

With a markedly cold winter compared to the previous year and historic snowfall, as in the case of Spain, European governments have started to apply the first dose of the vaccine. In Germany, priority has been given to people over 80, in Spain they have priority to residents of homes for the elderly, their caregivers and healthcare personnel.

While in Portugal, a new lockdown began after the recording of a record of deaths, reaching 159 deaths from covid-19. Portugal has more than 8,500 deaths and the number of cases rose to 10,663 in a single day, as reported by the Directorate General of Health (DGS). Among the containment measures, it was established that citizens will only be able to leave for essential reasons (purchase of food, care for relatives and work). For his part, President Antonio Costa intends to tighten the fines in this new quarantine.

Regarding the delay with Pfizer vaccines, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen pointed out that, learning that Pfizer would temporarily reduce deliveries to Europe to improve production, she contacted the pharmaceutical company “immediately” and they told him. assured that “all the doses guaranteed for the first trimester will arrive this trimester.” The President of the EC recalled that “normally”, it takes ten years to develop and administer a vaccine, and that to do so in less than a year must deal with all the “difficulties” which normally require more time. He also estimated that the “extended” portfolio of doses that the EU has already signed with various pharmaceutical companies, which exceeds 2,300 million doses, “mitigates the risk of problems that always arise when you have processes at this speed.” .

The UN-appointed International Emergency Committee on Covid-19 has rejected the request for travel vaccination tests and instead called for deeper data sharing and enhanced scientific collaboration to clarify unknowns about the coronavirus . The proposal came from the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, however, according to the official UN website, the Committee rejected the possibility of requiring proof of vaccination for travel because “the impact of vaccinations on the population is still unknown. reduction in transmission, in addition to the fact that vaccine availability is limited ”. For the team, if proof of vaccination is kept, international travelers should still not be exempted from complying with other travel risk reduction measures.

The director of the Emergency Committee, the French Didier Houssin, stressed the need for countries “to increase collaboration to fight the virus with the greatest possible knowledge”, attentive to the fact that he is facing “a race between the virus, which will try to mutate in order to develop more and more quickly, and humanity, which wants to stop it ”. “Scientific efforts have to be very rapid and very intense,” said Houssin.