Princess of Asturias Award for Covid-19 front-line health workers

NURSES, doctors and other healthcare staff ranging from cleaners to porters will collectively receive this year's Princess of Asturias Award in the 'Concordance' category, the Royal household has confirmed.

The highest distinction granted in Spain for services to the community, science and the arts, the Princess of Asturias Award – formerly the Prince of Asturias Award until the heir to the throne became a female in 2014 – is the country's answer to the Nobel Prize and has been won by celebrities worldwide from Nelson Mandela to Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood to Michael Schumacher, and even Google, as well as activists and charity leaders such as anti-FGM campaigners and conservationists like chimp expert Jane Goodall.

This year, the Concordance Prize – which, in 2018, went to marine biologist and environmental activist Dr Sylvia Earle and, last year, was awarded to the Polish city of Gdansk – has been set aside to share between the medical workers in the public health service who grappled with the Covid-19 crisis, risking their own lives in order to save those of their patients, often with extremely limited resources due to the pandemic's being the most widespread health disaster in over a century and no government on earth able to plan for it.

For the first time in the history of the Awards, the jury met by video-conference, but they were all unanimous in their support of healthcare workers being given the Concordance Prize, the first of the eight to be confirmed for 2020.

“With their heroic spirit of sacrifice, and taking on serious risks and costs – including the loss of their own lives – they have become a symbol of all the people, institutions and companies forced to deal with the pandemic head-on,” says the report on the award decision, which was proposed by Ginés Morata, Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiríbar and Sir Salvador Moncada, all of whom won the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technological Research in 2007, 1998 and 1990, respectively.

The recipients of the remaining prizes – Arts, Communication and Humanities, Social Sciences, Sports, Letters, Scientific and Technological Research, and International Cooperation – will be announced over the course of this month, from June 5 to 25.

Photograph by the Princess of Asturias Foundation on Twitter (@fpa)