Sotiris Tsiodras

Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias will on Wednesday update Greece's opposition parties on the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic, including progress in the nationwide vaccination program.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople will present a series of three webinars in its fourth Halki Summit next week, titled, "Covid-19 and Climate Change: Living with and Learning from a Pandemic."

The Halki Summit IV sessions will be held as three Zoom webinars on January 26-28 from 8 to 9.30 p.m. each day.

Amid global concern over the emergence of mutated strains of the coronavirus, the Health Ministry in Athens has announced the creation of a nationwide network for the systematic monitoring of these variants.

Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias announced on Friday that the ministry will establish a nationwide surveillance and alert network to monitor mutated strains of SARS-CoV-2.

This will create more accurate epidemiological data that will help the government make better decisions for the protection of public health, Kikilias said after a meeting on the issue at the ministry.

Greek health officials will meet on Friday to discuss how to contain the new coronavirus variants.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis received on Monday the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine against the coronavirus at Attiko Hospital in Athens.

Mitsotakis had received the first dose of the jab on December 27, 2020, when the first batch of the Pfizer vaccines arrived in Greece.

The "Coronavirus pandemic in Greece in 2020" was the most popular entry in the Greek-language pages of Wikipedia last year, according to data presented yesterday by the Open Technologies Alliance (EELLAK).

Greek authorities on Friday decided to increase random testing for coronavirus in west Attica and intensify checks for compliance with the health measures as the viral load in the area remained high.

Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias said at the daily briefing on the coronavirus that west Attica had over 300 active coronavirus cases.

Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias on Wednesday said that while hospital admissions are starting to even out with releases, the public health system is still skating on very thin ice, with Covid-19 intensive care wards at 83% of capacity nationwide.

Google's roundup of the year's most searched terms is out and unsurprisingly shows that the coronavirus was the top news topic of the last 12 months.

The findings are the result of Google's Year In Search, which also provides statistics on individual categories ranging from news and sporting events to recipes and dead celebrities.