All 78 residents of a nursing home in central Spain tested positive for Covid-19 after receiving their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and at least seven people have died, staff confirmed on Monday.
Most of those who succumbed to the virus had pre-existing conditions, according to the Spanish news agency EFE, while four residents are currently hospitalized and 12 employees are also infected.
The massive outbreak takes place at the Lagartera Residence for the elderly in the Toledo area, southwest of the capital, Madrid.
The home’s 33 staff are now required to submit a negative PCR test before going to work, and a spokesperson said health measures have been taken to stop the spread of the virus. “always.”
“On January 13, all residents, including nursing home staff, were inoculated with the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and after six days, the first symptoms began to appear in ten of the residents”, they said in a statement.
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Some staff started to become ill with the virus five days after inoculation.
On January 21, management approved the decision to test all residents of the home and quarantine them in their rooms, notifying families of the move.
The test results, on January 25, showed that all residents had contracted the virus except one, which later also tested positive.
In December, Spain’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation into nursing home deaths, which were a worrying feature of the early pandemic, which accounted for 69 percent of all Covid-19 fatalities between April 6 and June 20.
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The Lagartera residence for the elderly insisted that the current outbreak was the first of the pandemic, which had remained virus-free during the first two waves of infection.
The next doses of the vaccine will be administered at home on February 3, and the next round of PCR testing will be performed on February 5.
Across Spain, nearly 1.5 million people have been injected with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
More than 58,000 people have died of Covid-19 in Spain, and the country has recorded a total of more than 2.7 million cases of the virus.
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