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The Czech lower house will consider the government’s call for an extension of a state of emergency at a session on Friday morning. The minority coalition government say the special legislation should be extended until the end of March in view of the worsening Covid situation. It will need the backing of at least part of the opposition to win approval for the move.
The government says that a new law on pandemics going through Parliament is insufficient to deal with the present emergency.
Prime Minister Andrej Babiš says the country must tighten Covid measures to prevent a catastrophe in hospitals in the coming weeks, amid some of the world’s worst infection and death rates.
Ministers say they will decide on new restrictions after the legal situation has been resolved.
France will supply the Czech Republic with 100,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine by the middle of next month, the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, said on Thursday.
Mr. Babiš told reporters that the government had been trying for some time to secure more vaccines, adding that Israel had donated some. Five thousand doses of the Moderna vaccine that arrived from Israel this week will be administered to soldiers working with Covid patients.
The first delivery of the coronavirus drug bamlanivimab has arrived in the Czech Republic. The antibody drug helps patients avoid a serious case of Covid. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said on Thursday that the drug had been received at Prague’s Thomayer Hospital, which will pass it on to other hospitals.
Mr. Babiš said the Czech Republic was among only 12 states in the world to have access to the drug.
Next month the first doses of another antibody drug, produced by the firm Regeneron, should also reach the Czech Republic.
Some 13,657 new cases of Covid-19 were recorded in the Czech Republic on Wednesday, a rise of around 2,700 on the same day the previous week. The reproduction number for the virus remained at 1.18 while the national risk index was again at 75 points out of 100.
There are nearly 7,000 patients in Czech hospitals with the coronavirus, 1,432 of them in a critical condition.
Almost 20,000 Covid deaths have been registered since the virus was first detected in the country almost exactly a year ago.
In a letter to the head of the government in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, said he was deeply concerned about the extremely difficult situation in her country. He pointed out that the Czech government condemned the military coup in Myanmar in which the government was overthrown at the start of this month.
The Czech head of state also assured Aung San Suu Kyi of his continued support for the peaceful struggle for democracy in Myanmar.
František Šedivý, a former resistance fighter and political prisoner during the communist regime, who became a vocal advocate for fellow victims after 1989, has died at the age of 93.
Šedivý was sentenced in the early 1950s to 14 years in prison on charges of high treason and espionage and spent part of his sentence at the notorious Jáchymov labour camp.
He was released on parole in 1964, and during the Prague Spring worked to revive the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party in opposition to the one-rule of the Communists.
Šedivý long served in the leadership of the Association of Czech Political Prisoners and the Club of Dr. Milady Horáková, named after the only woman executed by the former regime in a show trial for her political activity.
The British group Morcheeba have been announced as the star name in the line-up of a pop concert to be broadcast live from the National Theatre in Prague on Saturday.
The show is in support of Czech culture and is entitled Národ sobě - kultura tobě. It will feature more than 40 artists performing on six makeshift stages at the historic building. Morcheeba, who are popular in the Czech Republic, will be performing via a relay from the UK
It should be overcast in the Czech Republic on Friday, with an average temperature of 12 degrees Celsius. More cloudy weather is expected on the following days, when temperatures will fall slightly.
A live three-hour concert is due to take place on Saturday in the historic building of the National Theatre in Prague. Called Nation for Us – Culture for You, it will bring more than 200 performers to six different stages. The event will be broadcast live on Czech Television.
Czech researchers have developed a unique method to detect pancreatic and other forms of cancer that often go undiagnosed in time to be treated. Their method, based on the lipidomic profiling of human serum, can detect the disease by testing a single drop of blood.
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