Press review – December 29, 2020

Romanian education had to face, this year, a great challenge, determined by the COVID-19 pandemic, the school being forced to adapt to the new reality. Teaching staff were put in a position to experience a different teaching and evaluation formula, and students switched from banks to online.
The curriculum for the final classes, which took the national exams in the summer, was simplified, and the way to conclude the class averages was changed, the theses being eliminated. The Olympiads and school competitions were suspended, and the National Assessment and the Baccalaureate were held in compliance with strict health protection measures. At the same time, special sessions of the national exams were organized.

For the first time, the students' results were published by anonymizing the name and first name, based on a unique code communicated to each candidate.
This year, there were no end-of-year celebrations or beginning-of-school ceremonies in September.
And the university environment has adapted to the pandemic, by holding online exams.

*** UNIVERSITIES – PANDEMIC SOLUTIONS
And the university environment was forced to adapt to the conditions of the pandemic. Students could take the exams online. And the tests for the assessment of fundamental and specialized knowledge and for the presentation and defense of the bachelor's/dissertation work were conducted online, in real time, in front of the examination board, through a platform that allowed dialogue and recording of audio content -video.
The specific measures (including online exam sessions, completion of online studies, online admission, etc.) were adopted and implemented by each higher education institution, being developed their own methodologies for organizing the entrance exams, respectively for the completion of university studies.
In addition, the Ministry of Education allowed Romanian universities access to the Integrated Information System of Education in Romania to facilitate the admission process in the online system in higher education institutions, having access to official information regarding the educational progress of students.
On the basis of university autonomy, with the assumption of public responsibility, each higher education institution has established its specific conditions for the organization of exams (modes of support), including the calendar for their implementation.
As for the entrance exams to higher education institutions, the universities in the field of medical sciences organized physically (on site) the admission to undergraduate studies, with the participation of a total number of over 11.000 candidates.

On October 26, Minister Monica Anisie signed an order withdrawing the accreditation of the Doctoral School at the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" Police Academy in Bucharest - "Law" and "Public Order and National Security" -, following the report of the Ethics Council and University Management. The Police Academy will be able to resume the evaluation activity in order to authorize doctoral schools after 5 years. In order to ensure the protection of doctoral students, they will be educated, according to the law, until the completion of their studies, stated the MEC.
The measures were taken in the context of countless complaints registered with the Ministry of Education on the topic of the quality of the existing educational act at the Academy level. At the same time, the report of the control body of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was also taken into account, which revealed major deficiencies following the evaluation of the status of the activities for verifying the originality of doctoral theses and the observance of quality standards and professional ethics in this institution of higher education, the MEC mentioned .

At the beginning of October, the Minister of Health, Nelu Tătaru, announced that, since the beginning of the pandemic, around 3.200 children between the ages of 0-9 and approximately 5.200 between the ages of 10-19 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 .
"The recommendations are that students go to school when the measures that keep them safe can be ensured, so when it is possible to go safely. In the conditions where the infection rate in our country is very high, these conditions can neither be created nor guaranteed and, in order to protect the children and their families, unfortunately, it is necessary to do online education", he emphasized. on November 29, President Klaus Iohannis.

On Monday, the government approved the draft Emergency Ordinance on the new structure and reorganization of the ministries. This normative act was necessary in the conditions in which the new Government has 18 ministries compared to 16 before and two positions of deputy prime ministers, compared to only one. Some ministries will change their names, given that they will have new duties. A novelty is that the Euro-Atlantic Center for Resilience will be established.

According to the normative act, the duties of the deputy prime ministers will be established by the decision of the prime minister, and the expenses necessary to carry out the activity are provided from the state budget through the budget of the General Secretariat of the Government.

How the ministries will be reorganized and what names they will have

• Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism - by reorganizing the Ministry of Economy, Energy and Business Environment;
• Ministry of Energy - by taking over the activities and specialized structures in the field of energy from the Ministry of Economy, Energy and Business Environment;
• Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure - by reorganizing the Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Communications;
• Ministry of Investments and European Projects - by reorganizing the Ministry of European Funds;
• Ministry of Education - by reorganizing the Ministry of Education and Research;
• The Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization - by taking over the activity and specialized structures in the field of research and innovation from the Ministry of Education and Research, respectively in the field of communications from the Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Communications.
• The Ministry of Public Works, Development and Administration changes its name to the Ministry of Public Works Development and Administration
• The Ministry of Public Finance changes its name to the Ministry of Finance.
• The Authority for Digitization of Romania will come under the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization.
• The Euro-Atlantic Center for Resilience is established, a specialized body of the central public administration, with legal personality, subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The organization and functioning of the Euro-Atlantic Center for Resilience are established by a decision of the Government.

The other ministries will remain as they were before.

The Spanish authorities will keep a register of people who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a file to which other European countries will have access, but it will not be made public, the Spanish Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, announced on Monday.

In an interview given to La Sexta television station, the minister reminded that vaccination will not be mandatory in Spain. Regarding the people who do not want to be vaccinated, "what we will do will be a register which, in addition, will be accessible to other European countries", he continued, specifying that it refers to those "people who were proposed ( vaccination), but who simply refused".

Minister Salvador Illa assured that this register will not be made public and will be developed "with the greatest respect for data protection".

His statement comes a week after the publication of a study by the Center for Sociological Investigations, a government polling institute in Madrid, which revealed a spectacular drop in the percentage of Spaniards reluctant to get vaccinated, from 47% in November to 28% in December, while the percentage of those who agree to get vaccinated increased from 36,8% to 40,5%.

Spain, one of the European countries hardest hit by the pandemic, with over 50.000 deaths according to official data, started vaccination with the vaccine produced by Pfizer-BioNTech on Sunday. The Madrid government has established that it aims to vaccinate about 2,5 million people - from the priority or most vulnerable categories - by the end of February and to reach 15-20 million vaccinated people by the summer, from - a total population of about 47 million inhabitants.

The Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy (IRES) conducted a new survey to find out how Romanians perceive the pandemic, to what extent they are influenced by it and how many of them would be willing to get vaccinated.

More than half of Romanians know at least one person infected with the new virus coronavirus, percentage three times higher than in July. Paradoxically, people are not necessarily more worried than in the summer, reveals an IRES survey. About 2/3, approximately 70% of Romanians say that they are very and quite worried because of the situation generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In July, 76% of Romanians were worried for the same reason.

However, people were a bit more careful. Lately, one out of 10 Romanians has been tested on their own initiative, almost three times more than 4 months ago. The percentage of Romanians who declare that they have been tested for COVID-19 on their own initiative has almost tripled - from 5% in July to 13% in December. 6% say that it was tested at the request of the authorities, and 9% at the request of the employer.

At the same time, 25% of Romanians are determined to get vaccinated as soon as possible once the vaccine is available, but almost 4 out of 10 are still reserved in this regard. Almost a third of Romanians say that they would not get vaccinated in any form.

A young man from a train station in eastern Romania kills another young man, beating him "like playing computer games". Several teenagers from Sweden beat and kill, for no reason, a Romanian beggar, who had not bothered them at all. This kind of acts of extreme, senseless aggression appears more and more often in society, and alcohol or drugs are only facilitators. And it leaves us with few answers and much worry. Judge: "They are antisocial" On the evening of June 14 this year, a 29-year-old man from Resita was beaten up by three young men. Two of them then took him to a shelter and set him on fire. "Well, I'm going to hell," said one of the criminals, before lighting the lighter. He was 15 years old. The court decided that he and his accomplice should receive the maximum sentence. "They are antisocial and have obvious criminogenic tendencies," the judge emphasized, explaining the decision drawn up last week.

A few minutes of that nightmarish night were recorded on a video camera on a pole. The street on the bank of the Bârzava river was deserted. Then, a child appears on the images lighting the path with the flashlight of the phone. Behind him, there are three young men who are moving slowly. One of them can no longer walk, and the others carry him holding him by the shoulders.

"Nobody is born bad," says Dorothy Otnow Lewis. A psychiatrist and professor at Yale University's Center for the Study of the Child, she has spent her entire career studying criminals and seeking scientific explanations for their behavior. In 25 years, he interviewed over a hundred people convicted of murder - adults, but also minors. "If you talk to these people who have committed extremely violent acts, you realize that there is an environment that created that," Lewis told The Guardian. She discovered a connection between childhood abuse and violent behavior.

Child abuse, Lewis says, works in many ways. The abuse itself can cause brain damage that leads to a lack of control. Then, through abuse, the little ones are exposed to a harmful behavioral model, because "children do what they see", explains Lewis. In addition, the stress of continuous physical and verbal abuse changes the structure of the brain. And, last but not least, "abuse generates an anger that is almost never directed against the abuser, but against others," says the American psychiatrist.

"265 colleagues were vaccinated on Sunday. There was no adverse reaction, neither minor nor severe. What we noticed after 24 hours was mild muscle pain at the site of infection, in a few of us. We have vaccinated people with comorbidities, allergic people, with all kinds of chronic pathologies, but no reaction has been revealed that would cause us problems and that we would report further. Mild tension states, due to the emotion or the exuberance of the vaccination", says doctor Oancea, manager of the "Victor Babeș" Hospital in Timișoara.

On Sunday, at 10 o'clock, vaccination began and at "Victor Babeș" Hospital in Timișoara, on the front line in the fight against Covid-19.

On Sunday I started at 10 am, today I started vaccination at 9 am. It was an epidemiological triage process in which the temperature was checked and whether there were febrile phenomena that contraindicate vaccination. Moreover, the informal consent was signed and the vaccination was started. A quarter of an hour followed during which vital parameters were monitored", explains the manager of the "Victor Babeș" Hospital in Timișoara.

A 95% efficiency rate

At the same time, the primary pulmonologist explained that the vaccine has a safety profile, and the efficiency rate is 95%.

"People need to understand that the vaccine has a high safety profile and the effectiveness rate is 95% and we don't put any CIP in that vaccine. We all want to regain our old lives, especially since new strains are starting to circulate in Europe, the third wave is waiting for us and only through prevention can we slow it down or stop it", he explains doctor Cristian Oancea.

The first symbolic tranche of 10.000 BioNTtech/Pfizer vaccines was brought on Saturday to the Cantacuzino Institute in the capital, from where it is distributed in six regional centers.

More than 3.000 doses of the anti-Covid vaccine will be distributed in all 10 infectious diseases hospitals on the front line in the fight against the coronavirus in the country. These are only for the first administration, and on the reminder date, the necessary installment will be sent from the Cantacuzino Institute.

Romania will benefit from a total of approximately 10 million doses of vaccine, and will receive weekly between 140.000 and 150.000 doses. The next installment of 144.000 vaccine doses is expected on December 28-29.

Vaccination stages

Stage I – health and social workers – public and private system:

• Staff from hospitals and ambulatory units (medical staff, auxiliary staff, administrative staff, security and guard and other categories);
• The personnel of the emergency medicine system: ambulance, SMURD, IGSU, IJSU, on-call rooms, CPU, UPU;
• The staff from primary medicine - from the network of family medicine, school medicine and community medical assistance;
• Staff from laboratories, pharmacies and other health workers;
• Dental services staff;
• Resident doctors, pupils and students with a medical profile;
• Paramedics and other volunteers who work in health facilities;
• Nursing staff working in residential and medico-social centers;
• The personnel who provide medical and social care at home;
• Staff from public health services (National Institute of Public Health, Directorates of Public Health);
• The personnel from the sanitary units of the ministries with their own sanitary network;
• Dialysis and transfusion center staff;
• The staff involved in running the vaccination campaigns.

Stage II

The high-risk population

• Adults over 65 years of age;
• People with chronic diseases, regardless of age, depending on the indications of the vaccines used.

Workers carrying out activities in key, essential fields:

• Key personnel for the functioning of state institutions (parliament, presidency, government, ministries and institutions subordinate to them);
• Defense, public order, national security and judicial authority personnel;
• Personnel from the vital economic sector:
  • Processing, distribution and marketing of basic foods (bakery, dairy, meat, fruits and vegetables);
  • Water plants, purification, water transport and distribution;
  • Power plants, production, transport and distribution of electric current;
  • Gas production, transport and distribution units;
  • Liquid and solid fuel production, transport and distribution units;
  • Production, transport and distribution units of medicines and sanitary materials;
  • Transportation of people and goods;
  • Railway junctions, civil and military airports, essential ports;
  • Communications (special telecommunications service, national radio and television);
• The staff from educational units and nurseries;
• Postal and courier service personnel;
• The staff of religious cults;
• Mass media personnel who carry out activities with a high risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection (eg: reports in medical units);
• Sanitation and waste personnel.

Stage III (general population)

• Adult population;
• The pediatric population, depending on the epidemiological evolution and the characteristics of vaccines approved for use in people under the age of 18.