Kranidi

The Amanzoe hotel in Kranidi is on fire

The hospitals of Nafplio and Argos in the Peloponnese received their first batches of the Pfizer-BioTech Covid-19 vaccines on Thursday, January 7, 2021. In Nafplio, the truck transporting the 115 doses was greeted with applause from the health workers and the deputy manager of the local hospital, Theodore Vassilopoulos, while the hospital in Argos received 145 doses.

An accommodation facility in the town of Kranidi, in southern Greece, was placed in lockdown for two weeks on Tuesday after three more migrants tested positive for the novel coronavirus, Greek health authorities said Tuesday.

The only people who will be allowed in the hotel are its employees, healthcare professionals and police and military officials.

Residents of Malakasa in northeastern Attica and Kranidi in the Peloponnese are demanding that local reception facilities for migrants, which were quarantined following outbreaks of the coronavirus, should remain under lockdown. 

Concerns are growing about the potential for high transmission of the new coronavirus within large enclosed communities after health authorities recorded 18 new Covid-19 infections in a Roma settlement in Nea Smyrni, Larissa, central Greece, which was locked down last month following an outbreak of the virus. 

Notwithstanding Greece's relative success in curbing the spread of the coronavirus, migrant reception centers across the country remain a concern as potential hotbeds for outbreaks, particularly on the Aegean islands where facilities are overcrowded and social distancing rules are all but impossible to enforce.

One hundred and seventy-seven residents from the small town of Kranidi, southern Greece, who were tested for the novel coronavirus came back negative, according to state-run broadcaster ERT on Thursday morning.

The tests wre ordered by health authorities after they discovered a cluster of coronavirus infections at a local facility housing refugees earlier this week.

Greece's health and migration ministers were meeting Wednesday to discuss protective measures to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading in the country's migrant camps.

The meeting between Vassilis Kikilas and Notis Mitarakis at the Health Ministry was being attended by the government's chief scientific adviser on the coronavirus, Sotiris Tsiodras, and other officials.

Greek Health Ministry representative Sotiris Tsiodras on Tuesday announced 156 new cases of the coronavirus, bringing the total nationwide to 2,401.

He said 150 of these cases were registered among the residents of a refugee shelter in Kranidi, in the Peloponnese. 

Another five infected people died, Tsiodras said, pushing the death toll 121.

An asylum seeker living at a Greek refugee facility has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, reports said Monday.