European nations launched a massive vaccination drive on Sunday, with pensioners and medics lining up to take the first shots to see off the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 1.7 million lives worldwide. With surveys pointing to high levels of hesitancy about the vaccine in different countries, the Czech government launched a video promoting the vaccination. “We cried, but now we want to live, and we will live as before! Thanks to vaccination,” the video says. In the Czech Republic, the first dose of the vaccine was administered to Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, while the second dose was given to war veteran Emilia Řepíková. In the second phase, will be vaccinated government members, general practitioners, dentists, pharmacists, and state emergency services (firefighters, police, etc.). According to the forecast of the Ministry of Health, vaccination of the general public (stage three) should begin in May 2021. The Czech parliament approved a government bill allowing voluntary vaccination against Covid-19 to be covered by public health insurance, and also outlining possible compensation for any damage caused by vaccination. Vaccination will be “voluntary and free” and it is planned for over 5.5 million people, or 60-70% of the total Czech population of...
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic number of foreigners in the Czech Republic was on the rise. Today, at the very end of 2020 there are nearly 617 thousand people from all over the world. Each and every person among expats came here for his/her own reasons. But what is important, is the way of these people, their stories. Without them, it is impossible to imagine these people. And it is even harder to understand them. IntegrON project, which was born as an independent youth initiative supported by the European Solidarity Corps, decided to collect these stories and assemble them into a chronicle of migration to the Czech Republic in the 21 century. Why, one might ask. The answer is simple: this is the only way to get to know each other. It is the dialogue, that has no boundaries. IntegrON’s guests are creative people who do art, theater, or music, diplomats, that work in the foreign service representing their cultures and nations, the people, who managed to “conquer” the Czech Republic: they have built an own success in a foreign country, fulfilled their dreams and became those, who they are today. We, Czech and foreigners, are closer than we think....
Over 462 kilograms of khat, a stimulant drug made from the leaves and twigs of evergreen shrubs, were found by customs officers at the Prague Airport. The drug was discovered in a cargo shipment from Dubai. “Similar shipments have been detained several times, but such a large amount is quite exceptional”, says the spokeswoman for Customs Administration, Šárka Miškovská. In February, a man who flew a flight from Doha, Qatar, tried to smuggle 45 kilograms of edible kata into the Czech Republic. Last November, customs officers detained 142 kilograms in seven suitcases from Tel Aviv, while two weeks earlier, a man flying from Dubai had 33 kilograms of this drug in his luggage. Khat is typically grown in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and is chewed for its stimulant effect. The World Health Organization classified khat as a drug of abuse in 1980. The green khat leaves are chewed and a small ball of partially chewed leaves are held against the inside of the cheek (similar to chewing tobacco). Dried leaves can also be chewed this way, though they are less potent. Some khat users also smoke the drug, make it into tea or sprinkle it on food, according to information provided...
A young German pilot said Sunday he traced a giant syringe in the sky as a way of marking the start of Germany’s rollout of vaccines against the coronavirus. Samy Kramer, a 20-year-old amateur pilot, had carefully plotted out the route he needed to take in advance in order to create the effect in the skies above Baden-Wuerttemberg. The manoeuvres included a number of 90-degree turns during the flight on Wednesday that lasted one hour and 40 minutes and covered around 280 kilometres. “There are still relatively many people opposing the vaccination and my action may be a reminder for them to think about the topic, to get things moving”, Kramer told Reuters TV on Sunday, adding that his flight should not be understood as a direct call to be inoculated. “Perhaps it was also a bit of a sign of joy, because the aviation industry has been hit pretty hard by the pandemic,” he said. The syringe-shaped route showed up on the internet site flightradar24. The European Union kicked off its COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Sunday. The 27-nation bloc staged a coordinated rollout aimed at projecting a unified message that the shot was safe and Europe’s best chance to emerge from...
On Sunday, December 27, the Czech Republic started coronavirus vaccine rollout against coronavirus. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis became the first person in the country to be given a vaccine in Prague, just before other hospitals in the capital and Brno started to distribute the 9,750 doses the country has received so far. During an interview with Czech Television, the 80-year-old Pavel Pafko, a professor at Charles University and a renowned surgeon made a slip of the tongue saying the word “vagina” instead of “vaccine”. “Let me first thank everyone who was involved in the development and distribution of this vagina… oh, vaccine,” Pafko said. As expected, the video went viral on social networks… “I don’t understand the 45 percent of the Czech population who are hesitant to get vaccinated,” Pafko added. According to him, people should trust doctors not only when they get into intensive care units, but also during prevention. “The vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech has a 93 percent effectiveness and has been tested on more than 40,000 people, there is no reason to worry.”
Effective the start of February 2021, Emirates will increase the number of flights on its route between Prague and Dubai. Emirates will increase its flights between the Czech Republic and the United Arab Emirates by up to seven connections a week. The routes will be operated by Boeing 777-300ER. Passengers will be able to fly to Dubai on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, with departure at 15:30 from Prague. Emirates has implemented a comprehensive set of measures at every step of the customer journey to ensure the safety of its customers and employees on the ground and in the air, including the distribution of complimentary hygiene kits containing masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and antibacterial wipes to all customers. Last month, Emirates president Sir Tim Clark Clark said he expects to see a sharp recovery in demand for air travel next year as coronavirus vaccines are distributed around the world, meaning the carrier’s full fleet of jumbo Airbus A380 jets could return to the skies by early 2022. On 23 December 2020, flydubai re-launched its direct scheduled flights from Prague to Dubai. Passengers are now able to fly to Dubai twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The list of currently...
SA’s Covid-19 reproduction number fell from 1.05 to 0.94, says the Institute of Medical Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic. Consequently, the PES risk score decreased from 76 to 71 points and moved from the fifth to the fourth level. The paradox is that today the Czech Republic officially moved to the fifth level of the risk system, introducing additional quarantine restrictions. The R number is a way of rating coronavirus or any disease’s ability to spread. R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average. If the number is below one, it means that the epidemic is beginning to decline. However, it is possible to speak of a controlled course of a pandemic only when this indicator is at 0.8 or below. If the score remains in the fourth level for seven days in a row, the government may consider easing restrictions. As of Sunday morning, Czechs had reported 670,599 cases in total, 93,714 of them currently active, 4,226 hospitalized with the illness, and 11,044 have died. V-Day Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis became the first person in the country to be given a vaccine against the new coronavirus...
As of today, 27 December, the Czech Republic moves into the 5th level of the PES anti-epidemic system. The government has therefore approved the corresponding more stringent measures, to apply until 10 January 2021. As a result, the night curfew, which will now start at 9 pm, has been extended again. All shops and services, including dispensing windows, will have to close at this time, and the government has again placed significant restrictions on them; once more, only defined basic types of retail goods and services will be allowed. Religious services will be allowed for up to 10% of seat capacity. Ski lifts will close. However, the government made several exceptions for services deemed to be essential: Shops selling: Food shops, including supermarkets and grocery stores Drugstores (selling hygiene products and cosmetics) Shops selling electrical household appliances Petrol stations (and other fuels) Pharmacies and shops selling glasses and contact lenses Pet shops and stores selling animal supplies Newsagents and tobacco shops Flower shops Household items (except furniture, carpets and other floor coverings); Goods for gardening Tickets for public transport. Services: It is forbidden to work for enterprises in the service sector (hairdressing salons, massage parlors, tattoo parlors, etc.). However, the list of...
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis became the first person in the country to be given a vaccine against the new coronavirus on Sunday.
260 swimmers took part in the 74th Alfred Nikodem Memorial race of hardy people’s contests in the Vltava River on Saturday. The water and air temperatures were 5.8 and 1.8 degrees Celsius. Despite the ban on sports activities, the National Sports Agency supported the event and the Ministry of Health granted an exception for its organization. The memorial was held under strict anti-epidemic measures, all participants passed an antigen test. As usual, there were three distances for the racers, with the longest measuring 750 meters and the other two 350 or 100 meters. The memorial has been named after Alfred Nikodem (1864-1949), a Prague goldsmith who made winter swimming popular in Czechoslovakia. 430 swimmers launched themselves in the cold waters of Vltava river during the last edition. Swimmers came from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Belgium, England, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Winter swimming was first seen in Prague in 1923 when he and six other enthusiasts plunged into the freezing cold Vltava River watched by a crowd of stunned on-lookers.
There are many ways to determine the most consequential and decisive events of the past year. One of them is simply to look at the most top Google searches and trending search engine terms in the Czech Republic over the past 12 months. Czechs were most looking for information about coronavirus and the two protagonists of the US presidential election, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In the most googled search in the Trend Chart, we find “how to make a face mask” and “how to wear it”. Roman Prymula – epidemiologist and former health minister, Roman Prymula was the most googled search term in the Czech Republic in 2019. He became famous in spring as the face of the fight against the pandemic and also when he went under fire after he was photographed leaving a restaurant in Prague, which should have been closed under the COVID-19 rules. Former Health Minister and Prymula’s predecessor, Adam Vojtěch made his way on the podium to become the second-highest Google trending term in the Czech Republic in 2020 In third place, we find the parasitologist, and evolutionary biologist Jaroslav Flegr, who has become famous in recent months mainly for predicting the development of...
Britain and the European Union agreed Thursday on new Brexit trading arrangements more than four years after the U.K. voted to leave the bloc, narrowly avoiding a potentially disastrous no-deal scenario. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted “the deal is done,” while EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised the agreement. The negotiations lasted about eight months and until a few days ago no one could say for sure whether they would end with an agreement: the European Union had already published the measures necessary to deal with a possible no deal, i.e. the exit of the United Kingdom without an agreement, a scenario that would have caused the reintroduction of many inconveniences both to theU.K. and to the European countries. On January 1, the breakup will start feeling real. The new year will bring huge changes, even with a trade deal. No longer will goods and people be able to move freely between the U.K. and its continental neighbours without border restrictions. It was worth fighting for this deal. We now have a fair & balanced agreement with the UK. It will protect our EU interests, ensure fair competition & provide predictability for our fishing communities. Europe is now moving on....
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