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Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

Francesc Sabaté Llopart-anti-fascist resistance fighter,

30/3/2020

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On this day, 30 March 1915, Francesc Sabaté Llopart, anti-fascist resistance fighter, and the most tenacious of the anti-Franco guerrillas, was born in Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia. 
With the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Sabaté joined the anarchist Young Eagles column and fought against General Franco's Nationalists on the Aragon front. After the defeat of the Republic, Sabaté was interned in a concentration camp in France, and later joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation. 

Following the end of World War II he re-entered Spain and joined the growing underground resistance the regime. Amongst his many legendary exploits he freed other imprisoned activists, robbed banks, assassinated fascist leaders and cheated death on many occasions.
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After robbing the home of a wealthy Franco supporter, Manuel Garriga, Sabaté left a note which read: 
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"We are not robbers, we are libertarian resistance fighters. What we have just taken will help in a small way to feed the orphaned and starving children of those anti-fascists who you and your kind have shot. We are people who have never and will never beg for what is ours. So long as we have the strength to do so we shall fight for the freedom of the Spanish working class. As for you, Garriga, although you are a murderer and a thief, we have spared you, because we as libertarians appreciate the value of human life, something which you never have, nor are likely to, understand." 
Sabaté outlived nearly all of the other active resistance fighters, only eventually succumbing to the bullets of the Civil Guard in 1960. 
In this podcast we tell the story of the Spanish civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/07/29/spanish-civil-war-podcast/
To access this hyperlink, click our link in bio then click this photo






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Coronavirus in Spain: Five crises rolled into one

29/3/2020

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Overburdened hospitals, a shortage of protective gear and testing kits that never arrive. The pandemic is reaching its peak without enough resources or a real picture of the true spread of the disease

El Pais Sunday 29 March 2020
english.elpais.com/society/2020-03-27/coronavirus-in-spain-five-crises-rolled-into-one.html

​As Spain approaches – or perhaps has already reached – the peak of the curve of coronavirus infections, hospitals are filling up with patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care, and health workers are feeling increasingly defenseless.

Through social media and labor union representatives, these workers are offering daily examples of ingenuity as they craft protective gowns out of surgical bedsheets or reutilize disposable face masks. Meanwhile, the fast testing kits that the government has been promising for days have yet to be introduced in hospitals, which are still using the slower but more reliable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system. In the hardest hit regions such as Madrid and Cataluña, only seriously ill patients and health personnel are being tested, making it impossible to know how many people are really infected.

On Thursday it emerged that the fast coronavirus tests that the Spanish government has purchased from a Chinese supplier do not work properly. The tests, which were manufactured by the Chinese company Bioeasy, have a sensitivity level of 30% when this should be 80%, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Meanwhile, workers specializing in the care of dependents have been requesting protective gear and equipment for weeks. Senior homes in particular have become a hotspot for coronavirus transmission.
Face masks

A large hospital can use as many as 5,000 surgical masks (the simplest type of facial protection) in a single day. This illustrates the magnitude of the need for this kind of material, as well as gowns, gloves and protective eye gear, which medical personnel need to treat infected patients.

On Wednesday, associations of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, dentists and veterinarians issued a joint statement in which they said that the 721,000 professionals they represent are in a situation of “complete defenselessness,” working in “inadequate and very risky sanitary conditions” because of the supply shortage.

According to Health Minister Illa, 550 million face masks and 11 million gloves will be shipped to Spain over the coming eight weeks. The question on everyone’s lips these days is, why did Spain not have a strategic reserve of healthcare material to prepare for such an eventuality? Experts consulted by this newspaper, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that it is not only Spain but all European countries in general that failed to take note of the SARS and MERS outbreaks, unlike Asian nations. There was no stock of medical equipment to face a pandemic, and by the time the latter broke out, the global demand for supplies made it very difficult to make last-minute purchases. In an interview on the television network Telecinco, Madrid regional premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso admitted that “purchasing material from other countries right now is frankly complicated.”

Test kits
Despite promises that new, faster testing kits would be rolled out days ago, when the material finally did arrive it emerged that its reliability was too poor to be an effective tool of detection. In the meantime, overburdened microbiology labs at public hospitals are still handling up to 800 samples a day using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system, which is very reliable but takes around four hours and requires highly specialized equipment and personnel.

The new, faster testing kits that do not need to go through a lab and provide results in 10 to 15 minutes were supposed to signal a turning point in the effort to determine the real extent of the coronavirus in Spain.

Ventilators
Many intensive care units in the Madrid region are already at twice their theoretical capacity, and hospitals have been forced to set up critical care beds in other units or even inside surgery rooms, which are hardly being used now that all non-essential operations have been placed on hold.

But the beds and the furniture are just the most simple elements of an intensive care unit. Coronavirus patients in serious condition typically develop bilateral pneumonia, which requires the use of a ventilator to help them breathe. But no hospital has the number of ventilators required by the current crisis, and thus they have become one of the most sought-after medical devices in the international market.

But there are many buyers and few ventilators in stock, as countries scramble to acquire medical equipment. Minister Illa has said that more ventilators will be shipped to Spain between now and June.

In the meantime, some hospitals are making their own purchases without going through regional or central health authorities. Madrid’s La Paz hospital has used an emergency provision to acquire Philips ventilators, electrocardiography equipment and other material, directly and without tender. In documents that EL PAÍS has seen, the hospital says that “the number of patients suspected [of coronavirus] is growing exponentially” and that “it is of vital importance to have a stock of [ventilators] in our facilities.”

Care homes
Many workers at care homes are being quarantined in a sector that is also in dire need of more protective gear and testing kits. After senior residences became hotspots of coronavirus outbreaks, the government said that their situation has become a priority and that employees will be tested. But on Wednesday the order had yet to be published in the Official Gazette.

Official figures from 2018 show 5,457 residences in Spain serving nearly 277,000 people. Unions and associations have been requesting resources for weeks. “We’ve reached this point very late in the game, if we had acted earlier, this could have been prevented,” said Antonio Cabrera, a health officer with the labor union CCOO.

“Residences are social centers, not health centers. Companies have protection equipment against infectious diseases to treat a few patients, but we could not possibly be prepared for an epidemic,” said Jesús Cubero, secretary general of the industry association Aeste. “And we are having problems sending material to our centers. Last week we had material confiscated at [Madrid’s] Barajas airport when we were going to send it to Tenerife and Gran Canaria.”

Home assistance
Over 450,000 elderly people receive home assistance, according to 2018 figures from the public social services agency Imserso. Unions have also been demanding protective gear for the workers who go to seniors’ homes to help them with cleaning, cooking and personal hygiene. The fear of contagion goes both ways: some elderly people are refusing to let the workers in. And some of the latter are quarantined in their own homes.

Antonio Cabrera, of CCOO, believes these services should be reorganized in order to keep serving only the most essential needs while minimizing the risks.

English version by Susana Urra.



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    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

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