Date Published: 14/07/2020
ARCHIVED - 263 new Covid cases in Spain during the last 24 hours as Catalonia prepares further confinements
ARCHIVED ARTICLE Yet again the figures are being queried as the Catalan Government has reported 745 new cases in the last 24 hours
On Tuesday the Ministry of Health reported 263 new positive Covid cases for the last 24 hours, as opposed to the official total of 164 on Monday. The Monday figures however, were dwarfed by the “weekend” figures, given that the Ministry chose not to make any official announcements over the weekend, but simply increased the official totals for the number of cases in Spain by 2045 new cases.
This brings the official total up to 256,619 cases reported and diagnosed by PCR swab test in Spain since the pandemic began. It must be highlighted once again that these figures do NOT include positive rapid antibody tests and people who have been infected by coronavirus but were not tested officially at a time when tester kits were in short supply as they were for most of the lockdown period.
The national figures report 8 deaths during the last 7 days, bringing the total up to 28,409.
In the last seven days, 4,297 new cases of coronaviruses have been registered, of which 2,327 relate to Catalonia and 500 to Aragon. These two are the communities with the highest transmission of the virus in the entire country and account for 65.8% of the new infections registered in Spain.
The virus transmission rate, which is calculated as infections per 100,000 inhabitants across the last 14 day period, currently stands at 14.79. However, Aragon and Catalonia have a rate of 51.92 and 48.44, respectively. Both Navarra (21.86) and Extremadura (16.3) also have high rates.
However, the figures being reported by health and the Catalan Government simply do not match up; today the Generalitat of Catalonia has reported that in the last 24 hours it has registered 745 COVID-19 positives. According to the data collected by the Health department, 197 correspond to the Lérida health region and 151 to the Segrià region, which has been confined via its perimeter for eleven days.
The other source of cases concerning epidemiologists in Catalonia is L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, which has added 129 new cases to the total in the last day and is the municipality in which infections have increased the most across the last 24 hours.
The total number of positive cases accumulated since the start of the pandemic in Catalonia totals 77,364, a figure way above the official totals reported by the national Ministry of Health (65,429), which also quotes the deaths in Cataluña as being 5,677. Three deaths have been reported in the last 24 hours, bringing the death count by the Catalan health authorities to 12,624 since the start of the pandemic in Catalonia.
As a result of the surge in cases the regional Government, the Generalitat, is considering the imposition of restrictions for the L'Hospitalet area, describing the data as “worrying”.
The Generalitat has confirmed however, that it will be going ahead with what it’s calling “a hybrid confinement” which sits somewhere between the phase 0 and phase 1 restrictions applied during the state of emergency, in Lleida and Segrià, which will come into effect at midnight.
Originally the restrictions were due to come into force on Monday but the Generalitat was prevented from applying the ban by a judicial order; this has now been circumvented by passing a regional resolution approved last night to apply restrictive measures in the area by order of the regional government.
-->