The arrival of immunotherapy in hospitals, the birth of gene editing and walking devices, the first drugs against Alzheimer's and injections for weight loss... It's difficult to look back and choose just a few milestones that demonstrate how, in the last fifteen years, medicine has funneled through countless advancements. Since 2010, tens of millions of medical articles have been published in high-impact journals, and as you read these lines, scientists and laboratories are not slowing down. Since its first issues, the ARA has reported on and delved into many of these achievements, and has not been oblivious to the ethical and economic challenges that health research has faced. Nor has it been unaware of the profound crisis of confidence that some disciplines have experienced in the last five years.

It's been a little less than three months since a pioneering ruling issued in Barcelona recognized the blood clots suffered by a teacher after being vaccinated against COVID with AstraZeneca doses as an occupational accident. Now, the Social Court No. 3 of Burgos has issued a very similar ruling, but with one relevant difference: in this case, the affected woman had received a first dose of AstraZeneca and two of Pfizer.

It's been five years since the worst health crisis of the 21st century. COVID-19 turned the world upside down, with millions of infected people and deaths overwhelming healthcare systems and nearly collapsing in many countries. The arrival of vaccines, on the one hand, and the constant mutations of the virus, on the other, have allowed it to become another disease in the season of respiratory viruses, such as the flu. This is due to a new mutation called NB.1.8.1, which has already been placed under surveillance. However, for the moment, the risk is low, both in mild and severe symptomatic cases. As of mid-May, 518 positive samples of NB.1.8.1 have been identified from 22 countries, that is, one in ten samples sequenced worldwide. "significant" compared to recent weeks. In Catalonia, the predominant variant It is still the JN.1, although cases have been increasing in recent weeks, going from fewer than 300 at the end of April to more than 700 in mid-May, according to data from the Information System for Infection Surveillance in Catalonia.

It took five years, but a judge has finally admitted a complaint from the relatives of COVID-19 victims who died during the pandemic in Madrid nursing homes due to a protocol that stipulated they should not be transferred to the hospital, and has charged the two responsible parties. Remember, this represents 7,291 people, a figure that has become sadly popular and one that Isabel Díaz Ayuso's government has tried to minimize on more than one occasion. The judge has summoned Carlos Mur and Francisco Javier Martínez Peromingo to testify next Monday. The former was Director of Social and Health Coordination for the Madrid government when the health crisis began and signed the so-called "protocol of shame." The latter—according to victims' organizations—coordinated the technical protocol that complemented the former and replaced Mur in the position starting in May 2020.

Among the various complaints from those affected by the after-effects of the COVID vaccination, one has resulted in a groundbreaking ruling made public this Friday. A Barcelona court was the first to recognize the blood clots suffered by a high school teacher after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine as an occupational accident. Side effects that, just a year ago, the same pharmaceutical company admitted within the framework of a judicial process before the English Supreme Court.

Five years after COVID-19 caused a global alarm, many unknowns remain about how it originated. The hypothesis that has been widely defended in several scientific articles points to a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan as the epicenter of the pandemic, but there are still voices that defend the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease came from a Chinese laboratory. This week, two German newspapers reported that the country's intelligence agency prepared a report in 2020 that pointed to the laboratory hypothesis, although the government, then led by conservative Angela Merkel, never made it public.

Although five years have passed since the outbreak of the pandemic, for many people, the coronavirus is still not a thing of the past. Long-term COVID keeps many people trapped in the disease, and in most cases, this means experiencing symptoms for at least two years. This is the minimum amount of time that 56% of people with long-term COVID spend sick, according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), in collaboration with the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP). In fact, There are those affected who, five years later, have not been cured..

It was a modest metal plaque, located at the foot of a sapling in the Ribes del Ter park, where the approaching passerby could read: "From the city of Girona in memory of all the people whom the COVID-19 pandemic has taken before their time. We will always keep their memory alive." This March 14th marks five years since the state of emergency was declared due to the pandemic, but the Girona victims of COVID no longer have that symbolic space of remembrance and tribute that the City Council, then headed by Marta Madrenas, created on July 14, 2020. Nothing has been heard of it since. The sapling planted next to it to provide shade has also disappeared, presumably not adapting well to the space and ending up cut down after the last drought.

The Community of Madrid was one of the European territories with the highest number of deaths during the pandemic and where life expectancy was most reduced. Epidemiologist Fernando García López explains this a few pages later. And that's not to mention the 7,291 people who were denied transfer to hospital and died in nursing homes. Or that the then Director General of Health, Yolanda Fuertes, resigned because she did not agree with the opening policy imposed by President Isabel Díaz Ayuso... And yet, in the 2023 regional elections, Ayuso won an absolute majority and nearly 50% of the votes.

For a month and a half, Miguel has barely gotten out of bed. He is completely disabled. Although he is already 16 years old, his parents have had to put a railing so that he does not fall while sleeping because he had woken up several times face down in the middle of the night. In 2020, like many people around the world, he fell ill with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic. However, unlike most people, he still has not recovered his life five years later and does not have any prospects of improvement. He has persistent Covid, a disease with no treatment and full of unknowns that severely limits the lives of those who suffer from it.

This month marks our birthday, as it's been five years since the lockdown due to Covid. It seems a long time ago, but there are people who were infected in the first wave and still have Covid today. They are the forgotten victims of persistent Covid, some of whom were nurses and healthcare workers who now see themselves left by the wayside. We also review what has changed after the pandemic in various areas, we see how the vaccine revolution has turned out and we talk to epidemiologist Fernando García López about what was done well and what was done badly, with Madrid in the spotlight.

First the pandemic and now the crisis in Ukraine. The third sector in Europe is being forced to rethink – and digitise – by leaps and bounds in order to serve all those in need. And Alfonso Lara Montero has even been asked to explain this at the Mobile World Congress (MWC). He is the director of the European Social Network, a European network that brings together the managers of the main third sector organisations in the continent. He arrived in Barcelona thanks to m4Social, organised by the Catalonia's Committee for the Third Sector, and talks to ARA as the big question of how to take care of the refugees from the war in Ukraine takes hold in the public debate.

Two years after the beginning of the pandemic, the mistakes that were made in terms of public procurement are beginning to emerge. The public auditor has detected numerous formal irregularities in the over 200 contracts it has analysed (emergency and urgent tenders) that were made during those months. It has also found inconsistencies in the dates, services that were invoiced and never arrived and others that, on the other hand, were maintained over a longer period of time than the contract allowed.

As of Friday there will no longer be a curfew in Catalonia, as announced this morning by Government spokesperson Patrícia Plaja. The decision was taken this Tuesday after evaluating the recommendations from the covid-19 commission. The curfew came into force on December 24 and, after receiving Catalonia's High Court's endorsement, the measure was extended until January 21. "We are convinced that the measures taken before the holidays have worked," said Plaja who, to justify the end of the curfew, which banned leaving the house between 1 am and 6 am, recalled that "it is a very invasive measure that violates a fundamental right." "It was very useful, but it is no longer useful," she added. The spokeswoman acknowledged that "there are still days to go before reaching the peak of this sixth wave", but stressed that "the most pessimistic forecasts for the growth of ICU admissions, fortunately, have not been fulfilled" and that "all the trends point to a slowdown".

The President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced this Monday that he will control the prices of antigen tests, as was done with masks. In an interview with Cadena SER, the head of the state executive has committed to act to lower the cost of these diagnostic tests, which citizens are forced to buy at their own in pharmacies. "The debate we had before or during the Christmas holidays has been, above all, about the supply of tests: there was an exponential increase in demand but not in supply. This issue has been resolved and now we will get down to controlling the price of antigen tests," he said.

People are suffering pandemic exhaustion and want to believe that the end of the nightmare is in sight, but the reality is that everyone knows someone who is infected with covid and the list of cases is growing and even endangering the proper functioning of companies and essential services. The peak of this sixth wave marked by the Omicron variant could arrive next week, but it is only the experts' guess, who are also waiting to see to what extent it is really milder or whether it will eventually take, like the other variants, many people to intensive or leave them marked with the dreaded long covid. It is not even a month since we heard about it and now it is already dominant not only among us but also in many other countries around the world. It is too little time to know how this variant will evolve in various contexts, which some have wanted to see as a lesser evil that could signal the end of the pandemic and the beginning of a flu-like phase, with outbreaks still taking place but causing far less harm than up until now. Most experts affirm that this will eventually happen, but they believe that moment not now, and won't even be in 2022, but rather in 2023.

The Catalan government wants to extend restrictions for another fortnight, until January 21. This Tuesday, it will approve at its weekly meeting the covid commission's proposal to extend the measures in force since December 24 and originally ending January 7.

The number of workers on sick leave has tripled in Catalonia in just three weeks, as the number of infections caused by the Omicron variant doubled every week, up to almost 124,000 cases in the last seven days. The impact on the workforce is significant: between Dec 9-16, 27,249 people were off work; from Dec 17-23, 45,117 were; between Dec 24-30, 79,484 were on sick leave.

Rampant incidence caused by the increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant, responsible for most of the new coronavirus infections in Catalonia. The number of weekly cases has almost doubled in the last seven days (from 39,578 to 78,586) and, therefore, has taken much momentum growth 15 days ago, when there were four times fewer weekly infections (22,717). In fact, in seven days, it has come to infect almost 1% of the population, a record never achieved so far in the whole pandemic, according to the researcher of the Biocomcs group of the UPC Enric Álvarez. "And it will surely rise more, between 100,000 or 150,000 cases per week, that is, between 1 and 1.5% of the population will be infected in a week," predicts the expert. This Tuesday the number of cases registered passed 24,000 for the first time since the pandemic broke out, although it is not yet known whether they correspond to a single day or have been caused by a backlog in inserting the data.

As every Friday two friends queue up at the cafeteria after having gone for their hour's walk to keep their "legs and mind" in shape. The ritual is the same as always, but today they have their covid pass with them: this Friday it will be compulsory to show it to access bars, restaurants, gyms and care homes. Rosa Casas and Núria Garcia are 72 and 75, and they are totally independent, but, like a large number of elderly people – "you can call us old ladies", they say – the need to obtain this QR code to continue living a normal life has been an added concern for them. "My daughter did it for me when she came home, because even though I tried I couldn't get it," complains Garcia, who says she "gets angry" when she has to "bother the children" to get them to solve her problems. Casas was helped by her husband, who had taken an "internet course" for the elderly.