Date Published: 17/08/2020
ARCHIVED - Spain notifies 16,269 new Covid cases over the weekend
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
The official total for Sunday was 1,833, but the total case numbers have increased by16,269 for the three day period
The Spanish Ministry of Health has published its weekday figures and although the Monday figures have been fairly demoralising for the last three weeks as the Health Ministry has stopped publishing figures at the weekend, making the Monday figures increasingly hefty, the figures this week are certainly worthy of a sharp intake of breath, exceeding 16,000 cases over the weekend.
On Friday the week closed with 342,813 and now we have 359, 082 a whopping 16,269 cases.
Sanidad indicates that Aragón (389), País Vasco (344) and Madrid (324) are the regions which most increased their case numbers on Sunday, although a better picture of how the cases are evolving is to look at the graphic below which shows the total number of cases by region, then the number in the last 24 hours, then the last 14 days and then last 7 days by region.
Click to see the detailed data
There is disparity in the figures, but as explained many times before, the system used to calculate the figures from the last 24 hours doesn´t take into account cases reported to the ministry until they have been properly verified, so we often have a situation whereby the regions report 1,000 cases and the Ministry figures only show 200 relating to that day; the other cases are gradually incorporated into the overall totals, which is why these are generally more widely reported.
1,016 people have been hospitalised in the last 7 days, 56 of them in intensive care. There have been 54 deaths in the last week, bringing this total up to 28,646.
Fernando Simón, director of the CCAES, said in his presentation that the situation at the moment is very different to that during the spring, something he has said several times before, trying to communicate the message that the majority of cases being detected now are mild or asymptomatic and are only being detected as large-scale testing is being undertaken "right now between 60 and 70% of the cases are detected when before it was 10%”.
In the early days of the virus when case numbers were rising rapidly, PCR tests were only being undertaken on patients arriving in hospitals or medical centres showing advanced symptoms, (as the tester kits simply weren´t available) and many of the asymptomatic cases were not being detected at all.
The aim of the PCR tests now is to try and prevent the further spread of the virus by detecting the mild cases as obviously, the risk of the virus spreading to an individual who will suffer the adverse effects which have killed so many people increases the more positive cases there are amongst the population.
This means that although the numbers are higher, that there is a lower percentage of serious cases now than during the spring: “there is no excessive pressure but in some hospitals stress is starting to show on the medical staff. Firstly because the cases are increasing, second, because we are in summer and staff are on holiday and third because hospitals are trying to catch up with all the activity that has not yet been recovered after the previous coronavirus upsurge in the spring, "he stated.
The objective he said, was “to reach September with the smallest number of cases possible”.