UPDATED: Spain says will be ready for COVID travel certificate in June, on track for herd immunity

Spain will be ready in June to use COVID certificates that would facilitate travels, Tourism Minister Reyes Maroto said on Thursday, urging the European Union to adopt this measure quickly.

The European Commission expects to finish work soon on a COVID-19 certificate that could allow citizens to travel more easily this summer in the 27-nation bloc, the EU executive said on Tuesday after a meeting with European affairs ministers.

In another development, more than two thirds of Spain’s 47 million people will have been vaccinated against COVID-19 by mid-August, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Thursday.

The vaccination rollout has sped up over the past weeks and Spain is due to receive 13 million doses of Pfizer vaccine next month, Sanchez told a conference in Madrid.

“We are on track for herd immunity: 33 million compatriots will be vaccinated by mid-August”, he said, using the term for when most of a population is immune to an infectious disease.

A growing number of people over 60-years-old are now getting their second shot, with more than 40% already fully inoculated, and vaccination has also started for those over 50.

At least three regions – Comunidad Valenciana, Castille and Leon, and Catalonia – have said they would start vaccinating people aged 40-50 by mid-June.

Spain has reported 79,208 deaths from COVID-19 and more than 3.5 million cases since the beginning of the pandemic. But the number of cases per 100,000 people over 14 days has fallen to 174, from 523 in mid-January.

If the trend upholds, masks could stop being mandatory outdoors by July or August, the leader of the northwestern region of Galicia, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, said. 

Photo: A tourist wearing a face mask walks in a quiet street in Benidorm, eastern Spain. EPA-EFE/MANUEL LORENZO