Date Published: 29/01/2021
ARCHIVED - First slight fall in the Covid incidence rate in Spain since Christmas
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
35,000 more cases and over 500 deaths as the British variant spreads and vaccine supply problems continue
For a few days now the Spanish government has exuded optimism that the third wave of coronavirus contagion in the country as a whole might at last be reaching its peak, and the latest daily update published on Thursday by the Ministry of Health finally provided a little evidence to support this view to a certain degree.
The pandemic situation remains one of extreme risk, however, and the addition of another 515 Covid-related fatalities means that the official Ministry death toll has now reached 57,806 (although other data suggest that the “real” figure is in excess of 80,000). Meanwhile, after 34,899 cases were confirmed on Thursday the official running total in Spain over the last year stands at just over 2.7 million.
At the same time, the resources of the regional health services continue to be stretched to an almost unimaginable degree: the proportion of hospital beds occupied by Covid patients now stands at 24 per cent (despite the second consecutive minimal drop in comparison with the previous day’s figures) and in intensive care units the equivalent figure has gone up to 42.84 per cent, while in the Comunidad Valenciana, Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Melilla and La Rioja the numbers rise to over 50 per cent (almost 63 per cent in Valencia).
This overcrowding in hospitals is likely to continue for some time even if the numbers of cases reported do begin to decrease gradually, but the good news in the Thursday bulletin was that the 14-day accumulated incidence rate of the virus fell for the first time since the Christmas and New Year holidays. Having reached 899 cases per 100,000 inhabitants on Wednesday, the figure now stands at 889.9: a minimal downward movement of around 1 per cent but nonetheless a welcome sign that the curve may finally be flattening out.
To put the figures into perspective, however, the rate of infection is still well more than three times the threshold of 250 above which the situation is considered by the government to be one of “extreme risk”, and among the 17 regions of Spain only the Canary Islands (186) reports a lower figure.
At the other end of the scale are the Comunidad Valenciana, Castilla y León, La Rioja, Murcia, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura and the north African enclave of Melilla, all with over 1,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last fortnight. On the other hand, the latest figures indicate falls of between 0.1 per cent and 4.6 per cent in 10 of the country’s regions, while in the remainder of the country the most significant increases (of just over 5 per cent) are reported in the Basque Country and Asturias.
The whole country is desperately keen to hear good news and in a sense these latest data can be interpreted as providing a little, but it is important to sound a note of caution. The number of cases involving the so-called “British strain” of Covid-19 continues to increase, and Fernando Simón, the Director of the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies, now estimates that it is “between 5 and 8 per cent”, and that the variant will probably become the dominant one in Spain in late February or early March.
At the same time, the well-documented problems in vaccine supply chains are hampering the nationwide immunization program. The latest data show that under 40,000 people received doses of the vaccine on Wednesday – around 10 per cent of the daily figures being reported in the UK – and the target of reaching 70 per cent of the population in order to create herd immunity seems very distant indeed.