Decentralization: A handicap in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic? The response of the regional governments in Spain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an ultimate testing ground for evaluating the resilience and effectiveness of federal and decentralized systems. The article analyses how the Spanish asymmetrical system of decentralization has responded to the pandemic, focusing on the management developed by the sub-central governments (Autonomous Communities) during the first two waves of the pandemic in 2020. The research, which is both quantitative and qualitative, employs multidisciplinary tools and information sources, analyzing and linking fiscal and budgetary sources with the available statistics and information on health.

Coronavirus as the Possible Causative Agent of the 1889-1894 Pandemic.

Using new and original nineteenth-century sources, we analysed the epidemiology, clinical features and virology of the 1889 pandemic, which was referred to at the time as 'Russian flu' or 'Asiatic flu'. However, we rejected this identification of the disease as an 'influenza', which we believe to have been based on insufficient knowledge of the causative agent and instead posit that the pandemic was caused by a coronavirus. We provide a new account of the 1889-1893 pandemic, with a more detailed chronology that included at least four epidemiological waves.