Date Published: 27/04/2021
ARCHIVED - Spain sending seven tons of medical aid to India
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
Travellers entering Spain from India must quarantine from Wednesday April 28 onwards
Spanish Foreign Minister, Arantxa González Laya, has announced that Spain is to undertake a "rescheduling of resources" in order to assist countries with fewer resources to face the pandemic, allocating 7.5 million vaccines "to be shared with Latin American countries once at least half of the Spanish population is vaccinated "and in addition, will this week send more than seven tons of medical aid to India, which is in a critical situation due to the coronavirus pandemic: " no one will be safe until we are all safe," she said.
This Wednesday the BOE will publish an order obliging travellers coming from India and entering Spain to be quarantined, with the aim of preventing the entry and advance of the new “Indian” variant.
There are currently no direct flights between India and Spain, but travellers from India can enter Spain via indirect routes, which connect through other destinations.
The government has taken a similar measure with flights from the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa during the latter months of the pandemic as part of measures to try and limit the spread of new variants originating in these countries.
The bans from Brazil and South America are still in place, and only the UK ban has been lifted.
Germany, France, the UK, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Holland have all announced restrictions, and Italy followed suit on Sunday, imposing a ban on entry for those who have been in India in the past 14 days.
Spanish health authorities said on Tuesday that there is no evidence of the “Indian variant”( B.1.617) being any worse than some of the other variants currently circulating.
The Indian variant has so far been detected in eight European countries, according to Gisaid. The UK has reported the most cases, 334, and there are also 15 in Germany, six in Switzerland, four in Belgium, three each in Italy, Ireland and Greece, and one in France. While none have so far been detected in Spain, the director of the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies has said that the possibility cannot be ruled out. He said, however, that there is no evidence to prove that it is more transmissible or severe than other strains of the virus such as the British variant, which is currently responsible for 94 per cent of all active cases in Spain.
There are obviously varying opinions about the virulence of this variant and how much of a role it has played in the current surge of cases in India, and the WHO has classified the Indian variant as a "variant of interest."
The Indian variant consists of two mutations on the spike protein of the virus; E484Q and E484K.
Neither is entirely new and have been identified previously in other mutations, such as the South African variant, B.1.353, and the Brazilian variant, P1.
In some cases, the Indian mutations were also detected in the British variant, B.1.1.7.