Covid-19 infections continued to accelerate in the world on Christmas Eve, due to the rapid spread of the omicron variant that forced Spain and Greece to impose the mandatory use of the mask on the street again from this Friday.
In his Christmas speech, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will call his compatriots to give themselves a dose of vaccine, while the country exceeded 100,000 new cases of covid in 24 hours in the last two days.
For Christmas, “there is always something wonderful that you can give your family and the whole country (…) get vaccinated, be it the first, the second or the booster dose,” he says in a message that will be broadcast on Friday.
In Spain, as of Friday, citizens will again wear a mask on a mandatory basis outdoors. “It is very annoying, but I think it is necessary,” said Aida García, a 28-year-old lawyer in Madrid, taking advantage of the “last day of freedom” before the measure began.
And in the region of Catalonia, one of the most populated, the authorities imposed a curfew from 01:00 to 06:00 in the morning and limited meetings to ten people just before the Christmas holidays.
Greece also recovered the use of the mask both indoors and outdoors from Friday to January 2. “There is a lot of movement during the end of the year parties and crowds congregate outside,” justified the Minister of Health, Thanos Plevris.
In Italy, the mask will also be mandatory outdoors, the government announced on Thursday without specifying the date of entry into force of the measure.
In the United States, where the omicron variant is already clearly dominant, 265,770 new cases were registered on Thursday, although that did not deter millions of citizens from traveling to celebrate the Christmas and New Year holidays as a family.
According to the country’s Automobile Association, more than 109 million people will travel by plane, train or car from December 23 to January 2, 34% more than the previous year.
These movements are accompanied by a vaccination rate that seems to be accelerating again, especially with booster doses of which 1.3 million were inoculated in the last 24 hours.
“The best gift you can give yourself is a booster dose,” tweeted Cyrus Shahpar, White House head of COVID-19 data.
Mandatory vaccination in Ecuador
In Ecuador, its inhabitants will have no other option than to make themselves this “gift.” The Ministry of Health announced on Thursday mandatory vaccination for the entire population over 5 years of age, the first to do so worldwide.
The country has 69% of its 17.7 million inhabitants with the double dose.
With the best vaccination percentage is Chile (86%), which announced that as of February it will begin to administer a fourth dose of the immunizer, starting with the most vulnerable groups.
And to the battery of available vaccines, the first one made in Latin America was added on Thursday, a version of the AstraZeneca drug manufactured jointly by the Argentine mAbxience and the Mexican Laboratorios Liomont that received the green light from the WHO.
Despite these shocks, stocks ended higher on Thursday, reassured by early studies from South Africa, Scotland and England showing that omicron carries a lower risk of hospitalization than delta.
According to the British health agency, those infected with omicron are 50-70% less likely to end up hospitalized.
Still, scientists ask for caution. Although the infection is less virulent, by spreading faster it can reach more people, which, in absolute terms, the number of hospitalized and deceased can reach high figures that saturate the health system.
The world has registered more than 5.3 million deaths and more than 276 million cases of covid-19 since the end of 2019, according to a balance established by AFP from official sources this Thursday.
