“We entered the pandemic without a navigation chart, but now we are in a very light stage and we are living a practically normal life,” stresses the Minister of Health
The Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, has explained that the mask will remain in force both in public transport, and in hospitals, outpatient clinics and residences, not for the people who live there but for workers and visitors. She thus highlighted it at the press conference after the Council of Ministers, where she appeared to announce the creation of the Public Health Agency. The head of Health has added that if the experts recommend changing the regulations on masks, the Government will announce it. But, for now, the debate is not on the table. “We have always been in the hands of science and experts.”
In hospitals and other health centers, the use of a mask – correctly placed – is highly respected. The same does not happen on buses and trains, where a high percentage of passengers wear it below the nose or even on the chin.
Darias has also stressed that, after two years of the pandemic, in which the world entered “without a navigation chart”, we are now in a stage of “a lot of light” and we lead a practically normal life. “Spain continues to advance and corner the virus”, he has highlighted after emphasizing the high percentage of vaccinated people. In Spain, more than 40.6 million people (85.7% of the population) already have the complete schedule of the vaccine against covid. The memory dose -the third- has been injected into 25.8 million people (54% of the population). This is reflected in the data from the Ministry of Health, which launched in December 2020, together with the autonomous communities, the immunization campaign against the coronavirus, a disease that has claimed the lives of 111,906 people and that, to this day, still maintains more than 5,000 patients admitted to a hospital. Of them, 354 are in the ucis.
Beginning in September, people over the age of 80 will begin receiving the fourth dose of the vaccine. The second generation anticovid vaccines they are already a reality. Are updated drugs against the new variants, especially against ómicron, and that will improve the not insignificant protection that traditional vaccines already offer, those created from the original variant, that of Wuhan. Just a few days ago, the United Kingdom approved the first bivalent covid-19 vaccine, also effective against omicron and its subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, of the Modern American company. It still needs to be authorized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).