Here we follow all developments on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 on an international scale.
9h29 – INEM has 18 infected professionals
It is an emergency situation, within INEM itself. Since the beginning of the pandemic, so many cases of Covid-19 have never been diagnosed. There are now 18 infected INEM professionals and 39 quarantined.
The vice president of the union of pre-hospital emergency technicians believes that the numbers will still increase. Rui Lázaro tells Antena 1 that these positive cases are affecting INEM’s response.
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9h15 – New emergency at Vila Nova de Gaia and Espinho hospital has already opened
Today opened the new urgency of the Hospital Center of Vila Nova de Gaia / Espinho. It has five thousand square meters, which allows an increase in service capacity of 50 percent.
And it will allow a safer service.
The new urgency of the Gaia-Espinho hospital center is an oxygen balloon in a pandemic time.
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The first patient to be treated was a suspected case of Covid-19, as the RTP report found.
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9h10 – AstraZeneca believes it will start distributing vaccine in Europe later this year
The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca will carry out further studies on the vaccine developed in conjunction with the University of Oxford. The goal is to validate the results of efficacy against the new coronavirus. This was after irregularities were detected with the vaccine dosage, during the first clinical trial.
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The company also reveals to Antena 1 that it is already in contact with the Portuguese authorities.
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8h57 – China adds five cases from abroad
The China Health Commission announced today that it has identified five cases of covid-19 in the past 24 hours, all from abroad.
Imported cases were diagnosed in Shanghai (east) and in the provinces of Fujian (southeast) and Shaanxi (northwest).
Chinese officials said eight patients were discharged in the past 24 hours, with the number of infected people active in the country at 303, including eight seriously ill patients.
The China Health Commission did not announce any new deaths due to covid-19, so the number remained at 4,634. The country totaled 86,495 infected since the beginning of the pandemic.
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8:40 am – CDS calls for urgent hearing of Francisco Ramos in Parliamentary Health Committee
The CDS-PP today requested an urgent parliamentary hearing of the person responsible for task force who will outline the vaccination plan against Covid-19 in Portugal, the former Secretary of State for Health, Francisco Ramos.
“In Portugal, no vaccination plan is known yet and only now has a task force which should structure this whole process ”, criticizes the Democratic-Christian parliamentary bench, through a request addressed to the President of the Parliamentary Health Commission.
The CDS considers that this ‘task force’ “has a critical and fundamental mission” and that this is an “operation that, in addition to being extremely complex, is a real race against time”.
However, the information is “scarce, loose and contradictory”, advocated the party led by Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos.
For this reason, the parliamentary group of the CDS-PP requests “an urgent hearing of Dr. Francisco Ramos” in that parliamentary committee, “to provide all clarifications about the vaccination plan against Covid-19”.
The CDS “is concerned about this matter, all the more because there is a possibility that the pharmaceutical companies that are producing the vaccines against Covid-19 may have reservations about sending doses to countries that do not have delivery well assembled ”.
Portugal “does not have it yet” or, “at least, has not proved it”, adds the party.
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8:32 am – More than half of dance schools at risk of closing
More than half of the nearly five hundred dance schools in Portugal are at risk of closing, because of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. The alert is made by the Dance Platform.
According to the National Dance Association, 12% of these artistic education establishments have already closed, and this percentage may be much higher.
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A survey directed at the sector shows that at least 25 the almost five thousand professionals in the sector have already abandoned the activity in recent months.
The drop in income is significant, so these professionals ask the Government for extra attention in the coming year.
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8:23 am – Germany surpasses the barrier of one million cases
Germany has crossed the covid-19 million barrier since the pandemic began, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced today.
In the last 24 hours, the European giant accounted for an additional 22,806 cases of the disease and 426 deaths.
In total, since the beginning of the pandemic, Germany has recorded 1,006,394 cases and 15,586 deaths.
The region of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous in Germany, has the most recorded cases: more than 250,000, ahead of Bavaria, with almost 198,000 people infected, and Baden-Württemberg (almost 143,000).
In Berlin, about 62,000 infections were diagnosed.
Germany will extend restrictions against the covid-19 until early January, including the closure of bars and restaurants and restrictions on participants in private meetings, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Wednesday evening
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8h12 – Russia with daily record of 27,543 cases
Russia reported an additional 27,543 new cases of infection with the new coronavirus, of which 7918 in Moscow, bringing the total to 2,215,533.
A further 496 deaths were recorded in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths to 38,558.
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8:00 am – Bolsonaro denies having called the virus “gripezinha” after having done it on two occasions
The Brazilian President denied on Thursday that he referred to covid-19 as “gripezinha”, saying that there is no record that proves the opposite, despite the fact that the press has shared at least two videos with this content.
“I said back there that, in my case, because of my athlete background – I didn’t generalize – if I took the covid-19, I would feel almost nothing. That’s what I said. So, the media people said that I called ‘ gripezinha ‘the issue of covid. There is no video or audio of me talking in that way. And I spoke for my athletic state, because I always took care of my body. I always liked to play sports “, said Jair Bolsonaro, in his weekly broadcast on the social network Facebook.
However, on at least two occasions, the Brazilian head of state, one of the most skeptical in the world in relation to the severity of the pandemic, publicly referred to the disease caused by the new coronavirus as a “little grip”.
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7:50 am – India to produce more than 100 million doses of the Russian vaccine
India will produce more than 100 million doses of the Russian covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, after an agreement between the Russian Direct Investment Fund (FIDR) and the Indian pharmaceutical company Hetero, was announced today.
“The parties intend to start production of Sputnik V (on Indian soil) in early 2021,” said the FIDR.
The president of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kiril Dmitriev, said that thanks to cooperation with Hetero, it will be possible “to significantly increase production capacity and provide the Indian population with an effective solution in this difficult period of pandemic”.
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Preliminary proposal of the vaccination technical committee defines priority groups
The first group to be vaccinated includes people between 50 and 75 years old and who have a serious illness. Also included are users and employees of nursing homes and also health professionals who work in intensive care and wards with infected patients.
The proposal has yet to be approved by health authorities. If you have the green light, this will be the first group to get the vaccine.
There will then be a second priority group.
Sources close to the process reveal that this second group includes people between 50 and 75 years old but with less serious risk diseases.
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Other health professionals who were in the covid zone and also people who are institutionalized are also covered.
The priority groups are created for logistical reasons and also because countries will receive vaccines in stages.
In the first group, about 750 thousand people will be vaccinated and in the second group, 3 million. Only then will the vaccine be extended to the rest of the population.
For now, there are exceptions.
People over 75 are not included in the priority groups because the pharmaceutical companies that are testing the vaccines have not yet proven the effectiveness of vaccines in this age group.
The work of the national technical commission may be updated as more information becomes available on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines being tested.
According to the most recent epidemiological bulletin, 82 more people died, for a total of 4,209 deaths.
There were 6,383 new cases of covid-19.
At least 59 people are hospitalized for a total of 3,192 patients. In intensive care there is 1 less person than the previous day, for a total of 516.
AstraZeneca moves forward with additional trial to validate vaccine effectiveness
The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca will carry out an “additional study” to validate the results of the effectiveness of its vaccine against the new coronavirus, after having revealed that there were unforeseen changes in dosage in the first trial. This is one of the vaccines that should be purchased by Portugal.
However, according to the company’s president, Pascal Soriot, in an interview with Bloomberg, he said that these new tests are not expected to delay approval of the vaccine by health regulators in the United Kingdom and the European Union.
AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford published the preliminary results of phase three of their clinical study this week.
One group of volunteers received the full dose of the vaccine, with a result of 62% effectiveness, while another took half a dose, followed by a full dose a month later, a method that was shown to be 90% effective.
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Oxford admitted that it was not initially intended to inoculate half a dose of the vaccine to any volunteer, but that this was the result of an error in the product’s manufacturing process.
As soon as it was detected that the first vaccine had started to be inoculated with a concentration below the planned level, it was decided to change the study protocol, according to the health “regulator”, the university said in a note.
“Now that we have found what appears to be the most effective formula, we need to validate it through an additional study,” said Soriot.
The AstraZeneca official also explained that, probably, a new “international study” will be done, although he guaranteed that “it can be faster” than the previous ones, since the researchers already know that the vaccine’s effectiveness is “high” and need “a small number of patients”.
Soriot noted that the authorization to start vaccination in some countries remains foreseen before the end of the year, although in the United States the process takes longer, as the tests were carried out outside that country.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,422,951 deaths resulting from more than 60.4 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report made by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
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