[News] France analyzes new confinement and England reaches alarming figures of the virus

[EvKirito]

 

 

France is analyzing the possibility of imposing local reconfinements to prevent a new outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which reaches alarming levels in England and has exceeded one million cases in South Africa.

 

Vaccination campaigns are accelerating in Europe and the United States to control the virus, which killed more than 1.7 million people - including 186,000 in Russia, which revised its numbers up - and infected more than 80 million, but the WHO is concerned about what is to come, and that it could be "worse" than seen so far.

 

France, despite the hopes raised by the start of the vaccination campaign, closes the year under the threat of a possible new confinement, which could be local according to certain officials, and which was the subject of study by a defense council meeting on Tuesday morning and chaired by Head of State Emmanuel Macron.

 

In the last seven days, 12,000 new cases of contagion were detected daily in France, far from the 5,000 target set by the government.

 

In England, the number of hospitalized for covid-19 exceeded the peak of the first wave, with 20,426 people admitted on Monday, and the number of infections reached a new record of 41,385. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 2.3 million people have been infected and 71,000 have died from covid-19 in the country.

 

"Here we are again in the eye of the hurricane with a second wave of coronavirus sweeping Europe and this country," declared the director general of the NHS (the British national health service), Simon Stevens, in a video posted on Twitter.

 

Spain receives new vaccines

Spain received "more than 350,000 doses" of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against covid-19 on Tuesday, the day after a logistics incident in Belgium that prevented its delivery early on Monday, the government announced.

 

With more than 50,000 dead since the start of the pandemic, according to the official count, Spain received the first doses on Saturday, December 26. The long-awaited vaccination campaign began on Sunday, like most countries in the European Union, and on Monday it should receive this first large shipment.

 

However, delivery in Spain - and in seven other European countries that were not specified - was delayed 24 hours by a "minor logistical problem," said Pfizer, which is distributing the vaccine throughout Europe from its Puurs factory. (Belgium).

 

Belarus announced on Tuesday the start of its vaccination campaign with the arrival of the first batch of Russian Sputnik V vaccines.

 

In recent days, batches of Sputnik V have been sent to Argentina - so far, the only Latin American country to authorize this vaccine and which received 300,000 doses last week - and to Hungary. Moscow hopes to have "millions of doses" by next year.