Tag: Spain

Spain’s north-eastern Catalonia region has again recorded a daily Covid-19 infection figure of more than 1,000, as residents endure new restrictions.

Health authorities are trying to halt this week’s surge, which has led to four million people around Barcelona being asked to stay home for 15 days.

Catalonia’s is the worst of 150 Spanish outbreaks and neighbouring France says closing borders should be discussed.

Spain has recorded 260,000 cases and there have been 28,400 deaths.

What’s the latest in Catalonia?

The latest 24-hour figures from the region’s department of health on Saturday record another 1,226 cases, 894 of them in the Barcelona metropolitan area, adding to a surge over the past week.

The surge led to tough new measures being announced on Friday.

Although they did not amount to a full lockdown, they have caused considerable concern in a region that was hoping to see an easing of restrictions.

The measures, for an initial period of 15 days for ??Barcelona, ??La Noguera and El Segrià, include:

– No meetings of more than 10 people in public or private
– No visits to nursing homes
– Only leave the house for essential activities
– Closure of nightclubs and gyms, restrictions on bars and restaurants, suspension of cultural activities and recreational sport

Barcelona bar owner Maria Quintana told AFP: “We’d just started to see things coming back to life with the arrival of a few foreign tourists, so this is a step backwards.”

Spain only ended its tough national lockdown about four weeks ago and was hoping to kick-start the economy, particularly with tourism numbers.

The streets of Barcelona were reported emptier on Saturday, although some residents may have defied orders and headed off in cars for second homes.

Wearing masks is being made compulsory in Spain both indoors and out in public if social distancing is not possible.

Only children under six and people with health issues are exempt from the law, which comes into force on Thursday.

Many European countries have now made wearing masks a requirement on public transport but the Spanish decree goes further.

Spain has seen one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in Europe but is now easing the lockdown gradually.

It already requires the wearing of masks on public transport and is now strengthening the rules across the population. Spain has reported almost 28,000 deaths and 232,000 infections since March but the rate of infection has declined.

Spain had imposed some of the toughest measures on the continent, including keeping children indoors for six weeks. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed parliament on Wednesday ahead of a vote on extending the state of alert for two more weeks.

What does the law say?

The decree states: “Using masks will be compulsory on the street, in open spaces and any closed place of public use, when it is not possible to maintain a safe distance of at least two metres (6.5ft).”

While children under six are not required to wear masks, all between the ages of three and five are recommended to wear them. According to El País, that means 45 million people will now have to wear a mask and another 1.3 million will be urged to.

The law underlines that it is following World Health Organization recommendations to minimize infection in closed and public places where there is a large concentration of people.

It says wearing masks is justified as it blocks the transmission of infected droplets in areas where safe distances cannot be guaranteed.

You are exempt if you have a respiratory illness or another health issue or disability that makes wearing a mask impossible.

In other words, people with asthma, allergies or forms of anxiety will not be liable. No penalties for breaking the law are mentioned and there is no specific type of mask detailed other than that it should cover both nose and mouth.

But they are by no means fool-proof – if you touch them, if you wear them wrongly and if they are loose around the edges they can become contaminated. And they are not a replacement for washing hands frequently and social distancing.

They are also not thought to be as relevant when people are outdoors.

The World Health Organization says only two groups of people should wear masks – those who are unwell with symptoms and those caring for people suspected to have the virus. It also says medical masks – which are usually much tighter and better made – should be kept for healthcare workers, who are most in need.

Source: bbc.com

Spain’s Socialist-led government plans to launch a monthly basic income scheme for the most vulnerable households hit by the coronavirus crisis.

The plan is expected to be approved next Tuesday and will aim to reach at least 100,000 households initially.

Each adult under the scheme will get a monthly payment of at least €462 (£410; $500). That may be topped up by other benefits, depending on need.

Finland has trialled basic income and Italy has a scheme tied to re-skilling.

However, neither the Finnish experiment – now ended – nor Italy’s “citizens’ income” scheme, introduced last year, made much impact on the unemployment rate.

The Spanish scheme will prioritise families, including single-parent households.

The plan is to scale it up later to reach about a million homes.

Social Security Minister Jose Luis Escrivá said it would act as “a permanent safety net for the most vulnerable”.

The scheme will cost the government between €3bn and €3.5bn annually, he said.

Spain is among the European countries hit hardest by the pandemic, but on Sunday its daily death toll fell below 100 for the first time in two months.

Italy’s income scheme requires recipients – people with very low income and savings – to retrain, as Italy’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the EU. It was 8.4% in March, and the economic paralysis under lockdown is expected to push it higher.

Source: bbc.com

A 113-year-old woman – believed to be the oldest woman in Spain – has recovered from the coronavirus, officials have said.

Maria Branyas was diagnosed with Covid-19 after the country went into lockdown in March.

But after weeks in isolation, Ms. Branyas recovered, having suffered only mild symptoms.

It means she has lived through the flu pandemic of 1918-19, the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and the coronavirus.

“Now that she is well, she is wonderful, she wants to speak, to explain, to make her reflections, it is her again,” her daughter tweeted.

Born in Mexico in 1907, she moved north to San Francisco two years later and arrived in the Catalan province of Girona during World War One with her Spanish journalist father. She raised three children – one of whom recently turned 86 – has 11 grandchildren – the oldest of whom is 60 – and 13 great-grandchildren.

She has lived for two decades at a care home in the city of Olot.

Speaking to La Vanguardia last year, she said: “I have done nothing

Source: bbc.com

It may be small but Pinor village in a remote corner of northwestern Spain has the peculiar distinction of being known for coffins, with Coronavirus death doubling demand at its nine workshops.

Spain is suffering one of the world’s most deadly outbreaks that has killed more than 18,500 people in just two months.

For mayor Jose Luis Gonzalez, the pandemic has sent the amount of work soaring for those in the coffin-making business in this village of just over 1,000 people.

“Since (the crisis) began, we’ve seen demand double from normal levels,” he told AFP.

At his own business, which he inherited from his father, that has meant workers constructing “around 400” coffins a month, when they would normally be producing half that number.

With deaths mounting daily, the funeral industry has also come under pressure because the usual imports of caskets from China “are no longer arriving”.

These days, the coffin-makers of Pinor are taking orders from across Spain despite initial supply chain concerns when the lockdown began on March 14, which triggered “panic that we might run out of caskets”.

In order to meet demand, the village’s craftsmen have had to speed up and simplify their way of working.

“We work many more hours and the coffins are more basic in terms of quality,” he said, explaining that they were plain varnished wooden caskets without any of the usual marble or glass adornments.

– Plenty of pine –

As to why such a small village would have so many businesses working in such a specialised trade, Gonzalez pointed to the abundance of pine trees in this area of Galicia.

“It’s a good place for casket-making because you have all your primary material in the area,” he said.

Over the years, tastes and trends have changed the look of traditional coffins.

Until about 25 years ago, all caskets were “rectangular and made of pine”, he said.

But since then, there has been a demand for softer lines “and pine doesn’t lend itself well to curves,” he said.

So instead of pine they have started using formaché, a new material made of paper fibres which when dry, looks like stone.

Imported from Ivory Coast, it is then moulded in Valencia.

Until now, the village itself has not seen a single case of coronavirus, but the mayor and his team are keeping a close eye on residents.

“I call my neighbours and the elderly almost every day. Everyone has my mobile number,” says Gonzalez whose staff have been helping out by bringing food and medicines to the most vulnerable.

Source: AFP

The daily number of coronavirus deaths has fallen in Spain for a fourth consecutive day, boosting hopes the country has passed the outbreak’s peak.

Monday’s increase of 637 deaths means 13,055 have died in total.

Spain’s population has been living under severe restrictions for more than three weeks, with lockdown measures now extended toward the end of April.

The nation has more than 135,000 confirmed cases, the most in Europe, but new infections have been slowing.

Spanish officials plan to widen coronavirus testing to include those without symptoms.

“It is important to know who is contaminated to be able to gradually lift Spanish citizens’ lockdown,” Foreign Minister Arancha González said in a TV interview.

Slowing death rates in a number of the worst-hit European countries, including Italy, France and Germany, are raising hope that strict social distancing measures are curbing the spread of Covid-19 – the disease caused by the virus.

Austria’s chancellor announced on Monday plans to start easing some of the restrictions in place because of the pandemic.

There have been more than 1.2 million cases and 70,000 deaths confirmed around the world since the virus emerged in China in December, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Source: bbc.com

More than 900 people died in Spain over the past 24 hours for the second day running, government figures showed on Friday, although the rate of new infections and deaths continued to slow.

Spain has the world’s second-highest death toll after Italy with the virus so far claiming 10,935 lives 932 in the past day from 117,710 confirmed coronavirus cases.

But health ministry figures confirm a consistent downward trend in the rate of new cases and fatalities.

The latest number show the rate of infections up by 6.8 percent, compared with 7.9 percent on Thursday and 20 percent in the middle of last week.

And the daily rise in deaths also slowed to 9.3 percent on Friday, down from 10.5 percent on Thursday, and a big drop from the 27-percent increase on March 25.

Spain and France appear to be recording a flattening of their infection curves over the past few days and are nearing or even past their peaks in daily deaths.

The crisis has hit Spain’s elderly population especially hard with authorities admitting that they are not getting access to limited breathing machines, which are being used first on healthier, younger patients. More than half of Spain’s 10,935 deaths have come in the last seven days alone.

Source: France24

Spain has recorded another 864 deaths related to coronavirus, the highest in one day, as the total number of deaths across Europe has gone beyond 30,000.

More than 9,000 people have died in Spain, which is second only to Italy in fatalities caused by the virus.

Confirmed cases in the country have passed 100,000, but numbers show the infection rate continues to fall.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said the pandemic was the world’s biggest challenge since World War Two.

The warning comes amid dire predictions about the possible economic impact of measures imposed to fight the virus. A UN report estimates that up to 25 million jobs could be lost around the world as the result of the outbreak.

The number of confirmed cases globally is now over 870,000, with more than 43,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University in the US.

Follow our latest updates on the coronavirus crisis Wednesday’s number of deaths in Spain was marginally higher than the 849 announced the day before, and the country has now seen more than 800 deaths for five days in a row. But health officials believe the latest 12% increase in daily infections is further evidence that the rate has stabilised.

Spain has been in lockdown for over two weeks, with further restrictions on movement introduced two days ago. But health services in the hardest-hit areas, including Madrid and Catalonia, are still struggling, with shortages of medical equipment a particular problem.

Italy remains the worst-affected country, with a total of 105,792 confirmed cases and 13,155 deaths. Spain has 102,136 cases and 9,053 deaths. However, Italy has seen the daily rise in infection rates fall to less than 3%, well down on a few days ago.

The number of deaths in the US has now topped 4,000, and Iran says Covid-19 – the disease caused by coronavirus – has claimed 3,000 lives. Belgium said more than half its intensive care beds were occupied as it reported a rise of 123 deaths, bringing the country’s death toll to 828.

Meanwhile France reported 509 deaths from Coronavirus in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 4,032. It is the fourth country to record more than 4,000 fatalities after Italy, Spain and the US. The total number of confirmed cases is now 56,989, up about 9% from Tuesday.

The UK on Wednesday recorded 563 deaths in 24 hours – it is the first time its daily toll has been higher than France’s. However Britain’s overall death toll, 2,352, is still lower.

Source: bbc.com

Spain’s Princess Maria Teresa of Bourbon-Parma has become the first royal in the world to die from coronavirus, according to a statement from her brother, Prince Sixto Enrique.

The princess, a distant cousin of King Felipe VI, was 86 and died in Paris on Thursday, her brother said.

Her funeral was held in Madrid on Friday.

As of Sunday a total of 2,606 people in France had died from coronavirus, France’s director-general of health, Jérôme Salomon, said, marking an increase of 292 deaths in 24 hours.

France recorded a total of 40,174 confirmed cases of the virus Sunday, according to the French public health website. That’s 2,599 more cases than on Saturday, marking a 6.9% increase — a smaller rise than the past several days.

Spain has also recorded a smaller percentage increase in case numbers in recent days. The country has recorded more than 80,000 cases and 6,803 deaths, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

The British royal family has also been affected by the global pandemic.

Prince Charles, first in line to the British throne, tested positive for coronavirus on March 25. Charles, 71, is currently self-isolating.

Source: edition.cnn.com

The death toll in Spain soared over 4,800 Friday after 769 people died in 24 hours, in what was a record one-day figure for fatalities, the government said.

Health ministry figures showed the number of deaths reaching 4,858, while cases jumped to 64,059, although the rate of new infections appeared to be slowing, registering a 14 percent increase compared with 18 percent a day earlier.

Source: France24

Madrid’s ice rink has been hastily transformed into a makeshift mortuary as Spanish authorities scrambled on Tuesday to cope with soaring numbers of deaths and new infections from the coronavirus.

The first hearse arrived on Tuesday at Madrid’s ice rink, which was transformed into a makeshift mortuary, as Spanish authorities scrambled to deal with a rising death toll from the coronavirus.

Health workers accounted for nearly 14 percent of Spain’s total reported coronavirus cases as of Tuesday, up from 12 percent the previous day, according to data presented by health emergency chief Fernando Simon at a news conference.

Some 5,400 health care workers have been diagnosed with the virus, Simon said.

Europe’s second-worst hit country

Spain is Europe’s second-worst hit country after Italy, with 2,696 deaths and nearly 40,000 confirmed cases. Overnight Monday, 6,600 cases of infection and more than 500 deaths were reported, the sharpest daily increase since the start of the crisis.

Authorities said facilities could not cope and agreed to transform the Palacio de Hielo mall, home to an Olympic-sized ice rink, into a morgue.

Footage from Reuters TV showed vehicles at the building cordoned off by police officers in masks.

The military disinfected 179 nursing homes on Monday and plan to clean another 96 on Tuesday, officials said.

The state prosecutor has opened an investigation after Defence Minister Margarita Robles said the army had found unattended bodies at nursing homes. She did not say what had caused their deaths.

In the southern region of Andalusia, the mayor of a small town pleaded for help after reporting 38 of 42 residents at the local nursing home had tested positive for the virus, along with 60% of staff.

“The virus doesn’t kill people … what’s killing people is the system,” Rafael Aguilera, mayor of Alcala del Valle told a news conference.

“Our seniors need a permanent solution now. We need oxygen, ambulances and hospitals,” he said in a video posted on the town’s Facebook page. “A person died in our arms because we couldn’t get hold of oxygen.”

Most Madrid, Barcelona airport terminals to be closed

While Madrid long accounted for around half of Spain’s coronavirus cases, new data published on Tuesday showed it now had just under a third of the total, in a sign that the epidemic is spreading throughout the country.

Spanish airport operator Aena said it would close most terminals at Madrid and Barcelona’s main airports as air traffic plummeted due to travel restrictions imposed to limit the spread of the virus.

Transport Minister Jose Luis Abalos said traffic through Aena’s airports had fallen by 82% since the state of emergency was enforced on March 14.

Foreign Minister ?Arancha Gonzalez Laya told Cadena Ser Catalan radio station the government was working to return Spaniards who were travelling abroad at the time of the outbreak and have struggled to fly home.

Around 1,200 people were brought back last weekend and the government is in touch with airlines for the return of Spaniards from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Indonesia and the Philippines, she said.

Source: France24

The coronavirus death toll in Spain has jumped by 514 in a single day, as the situation in the country quickly worsens.

Official figures show that 2,696 people have now died in the country and close to 40,000 are infected.

About 5,400 health care workers are among those confirmed cases.

Spain is the worst affected country in Europe after Italy, which has recorded more than 6,000 deaths so far.

While cases were mostly concentrated in Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country, infection numbers are growing in other regions.

Castilia-La Mancha and Castilla y Leon, which border the capital, have seen a big jump in cases. Both regions have large elderly populations.

Source: bbc.com

A funeral held in northern Spain about two weeks ago has been named as the biggest source of coronavirus in the country, local media have reported.

More than 60 people at the ceremony in the Basque capital of Vitoria-Gasteiz, and their close contacts have been infected, according to the National Centre for Microbiology (CNM).

Meanwhile, the first case of the virus has also been reported inside a Spanish prison.

Officials have decided to put parts of the prison in Aranjuez – about 12 miles (20km) south of Madrid – into lockdown after a staff member fell ill, according to Spanish news agency EFE.

In total, there have been 402 cases recorded in the country. Eight people have died.

Spanish authorities reported the country’s first case at the end of January, with the first death on 13 February.

Source: bbc.com