Daily updates

The meeting of the Valencia Health Council has just ended and, as anticipated, all restrictions in the Valencia Region have been extended until 23:59 on 1st March
Other regions are relaxing their restrictions, such as Madrid which is allowing 6 people at an outside table, Murcia which allows some cafes and restaurants to open with cohabitants, Catalonia which now allows restaurants to open during breakfast and lunchtime and is considering allowing opening in the evenings. The Basque Country courts ruled that cafes and restaurants could open but the Valencia Region, despite protests and the restaurant owners in Castellon and Alicante saying they will open next Tuesday, has decided to keep them closed.

The Valencia Region has the highest incident of cases with Alicante province being the highest in the region. Despite the number of cases dropping from 1,400 per 100,000 at the beginning of the month to 777 per 100,000 now, the President of the community says this is still too high but will consider lowering the restrictions from March 1st to May 9th.

DOGV issued today and date of restrictions now altered to 23:59 1st March.

Current Restrictions post has been updated.

Thank you Marcliffe.

Yes. Thanks Marclff it can't be easy to always give bad news - bound to get better sometime.

Thank you helpful as always.

Unfortunately 3 cases of the South African strain have been confirmed in Elche. This is the first report of the new strain in the Comm Valenciana. They don't know yet how the people became infected as they hadn't been to any of the infected regions.

https://www.informacion.es/alicante/202 ... 20d%C3%ADa

Bee

Yes there don't seem any end to it, ho well we have just got to get on with it just keep safe.

Valencian Supreme Court has allowed an appeal from the hospitality groups in the region to reopen the bars and restaurants. They say it is against their human rights to close their businesses.

The Alicante province will start vaccinating the over 90s as from Monday along with doctors, dentists, those working in covid laboratories etc. There are, they say, some 18,000 people in the province over the age of 80 and they plan to give the 60,000 vaccines they will have over the next week. They will start with the over 80s the following week and they say this group number more than 80,000 so are awaiting further supplies which should be back to normal supplies this coming week,

Nearly 3 million in Spain have now received the vaccine and over a million of them have had both doses. They are also awaiting approval of a new vaccine at the beginning of March, Currently undergoing trials against the S African variant and has shown a 60% efficacy rate against that which is about the same as the others. It has shown over 90% efficacy against other strains. The vaccine will be produced in Barcelona and is made by Johnson & Johnson.

Thank you for the information.

The health department has stated that the covid vaccine for those over the age of 90 has been started in people's homes. Health workers have been going to peoples' houses and administering the vaccine to those who cannot attend a surgery. There has been no announcement of when general appointments to the public will be made available.

Spain will receive just over 2 million vaccines this month from the combined companies. This is not enough to keep the programme on track and the mass vaccination in open centres, such as sports pavilions, will start at the beginning of April.

On the good news front, Spain will start producing the vaccines made by Moderna and Astra Zeneca. A company called Rovi will manufacture the Moderna vaccine, Insud Pharma the Astra Zeneca vaccine.
The Janssen and Novavax vaccines are expected to be approved at the beginning of March and these will be made in Spain by Reig Jofre and Biofabri respectively. This should more than fill the required number of vaccines available which will also be shipped to other EU countries.

The Minister of Tourism has stated that Spain is working on a vaccine passport to allow people who have been vaccinated to travel throughout Spain and the other EU countries where work is being done with the same ends.

Most of the press is dominated by the elections in Catalonia yesterday. The outgoing Min of Health, Sr Illa for PSOE socialists, got the most votes but the majority of seats went to the 2 independent parties. The turnout was very low due to the pandemic and the bad weather they had there which does help the independents as their voters are more likely to turn out. They are now scrabbling to form coalitions so they can appoint a president for the region. 8 parties took part in the elections.

Another good bit of news is the drop in infections in the Alicante province. Only 292 new cases were reported today which is the lowest of the year and the number of deaths on Sunday and Monday dropped to 23. In the whole of the Valencia region, only 660 new cases were reported today and 44 deaths in the last two days, a big drop from the over 100 per day for most of last week.. The number of recovered and discharged from hospital is more than 10 times the number admitted.

The only new outbreak reported today in the Alicante province was in Elche which affected 4 people and was of social origin.

The number affected per 100,000 in the Valencia region was over 1200 last week, 807 on Friday and has now dropped to 505 per 100,000 which is only just above the national average of 416 but is no longer the highest in Spain which is now taken by Madrid and Castilla y Leon.

Unfortunately ,the number of positives at 17.7% is still very high and the aim of lowering this to 5% could take some time. Ximo Puig, the president of the Valencia Region, has said that because of this it is not the time to reduce the current restrictions but he would be looking at a phased deceleration from March 1st when the current restrictions end but not before.

I haven't seen any news on the appeal to the supreme court by the hostelry organisations on the re-opening of bars and restaurants.

Alicante has decided to close all parks and government offices, libraries, museums and the Santa Barbara castle among others at 6pm and the children's playgrounds will remain closed throughout the whole day.

Thank you Marcliff for the update.Good news about the drop in cases which surely goes to prove the restrictions in place are working and should stay that way.