March 1, 2021
Parliament debates 2021 budget bill./ Gaudeamus Book Fair organised by Radio Romania under way at gaudeamus.ro.
Newsroom, 01.03.2021, 13:55
Budget.
Parliament is today debating this year’s state budget and social security
budget bills proposed by the government, with the final vote expected to take
place tomorrow. The bills were approved by the specialist committees without any
of the 4,000 amendments filed by the opposition, which accuses the government of
pushing for an austerity budget. The government instead describes it as fostering
development and reform. Finance minister Alexandru Nazare says the state budget
is aimed at economic recovery and does not contain tax rises or salary cuts.
Vaccination.
A further 130 vaccination hubs will be
opening from 1st March in Romania, where over 915,000 people have
received the Covid vaccine using mostly the Pfizer-BioNTech jab. The Moderna
and AstraZeneca vaccines are also available in Romania. 214,000 Pfizer-BioNTech
doses are delivered to Romania today. The coordinator of the mass immunisation campaign
dr. Valeriu Gheorghiţă said the general population will be able to make vaccination
appointments on the digital platform from the middle of the month, with actual
vaccination as part of phase three due to kick off in April. On the other hand,
specialists are warning that Romania is on the verge of the third wave of the Covid
pandemic and are calling on the population to comply with the restrictions in
place and continue to observe the three basic rules: wear facemasks, wash hands
and maintain physical distance. Romania has seen over 804,000 coronavirus cases
to date and over 20,400 deaths, with 2,096
new cases and 53 deaths recorded on Monday. Some 1,000 Covid patients are in
intensive care.
Travel.
Italy is today enforcing a number of regional restrictions to combat the coronavirus
pandemic. Lombardy, Marche and Piedmont will now be in the amber zone, and the
Basilicata and Molise, which are in the red zone, will be in effect cut off
from the rest of the country. According to Radio Romania’s correspondent in
Italy, the island of Sardinia is the only region with a low number of
infections. The Italian government is preparing to announce a set of measures
for a whole month, including the Easter holidays. Germany is restricting travel
on the border with France after a French border region was declared a high-risk
area for the spread of Covid. France managed to negotiate however more relaxed
measures compared with those imposed by Germany on its Czech and Austrian
borders. According to worldometers.info, there are over 114 million global
coronavirus cases, while the death toll surpassed 2.5 million.
Protests.
Romanian healthcare workers are again staging protests today and tomorrow in
Bucharest during the debates on this year’s budget in Parliament. Their aim is
to convince MPs to pass the changes proposed by trade unions, namely more money
for healthcare and pay rises for healthcare workers. Protesters are also
demanding measures that have to do with
staff safety, including the provision of protective equipment and material and
human resources, in order to reduce the number of new Covid cases and fatalities
among healthcare workers.
Car production. Renault’s Dacia factories in Mioveni, in southern Romania, will suspend production
for five days this month and most probably in April again, amid the ongoing
global shortage of computer chips for cars. Only the departments making gear
boxes and engines for other Renault models will remain in operation.
Book fair. The Gaudeamus Book Fair organised
by Radio Romania gets under way today. Held entirely online at gaudeamus.ro,
the fair will last for a whole month. It brings together over 70 Romanian
publishing houses and dozens of events and book launches. The themes of the
fair this year are non-fiction books, poetry and children’s books. The lineup
of the first day of the festival features an interview with the American writer
Ali Standish, the author of the young adult book The Ethan I Was Before. (CM)
