Date Published: 24/09/2020
ARCHIVED - Spain passes 700,000 coronavirus cases since pandemic began
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
10,653 new cases and 84 deaths in the last 24 hours
The Spanish Ministry of Health has reported 3,471 new positives diagnosed within the last 24 hours this Thursday after registering 4,143 daily cases yesterday. These new diagnoses are added to the cases notified by the regional health authorities in preceding days which have been verified and added into the system during the latest 24 hour period, bringing the total up to 10,653 for the last 24 hours.
In just 40 days, since mid-August, the country has more than doubled its number of total cases, from 342,813 positives on August 14th to more than 700,000 infected today.
The new diagnoses remain in line with the figures reported on Monday and Tuesday, which were 2,957 and 3,125, although according to the report, today's data does not include Andalusia, which "has not been able to update the data due to technical problems."
The total number of cases diagnosed since the beginning of the pandemic thus rises to 704,209.
Click for detailed source data relating to the coronavirus situation in Spain on 24th September.
This means that officially 1.4% of the country's population has contracted covid, although the real number of infected, according to the estimates of the serological studies undertaken by the Ministry of Health, should be around 2.3 million people (around 5% of the nationwide population according to the results of the first three rounds of tests). The Ministry is planning to repeat the exercise in the coming weeks to try and ascertain whether the percentage of the population who have contracted the virus has increased.
Deaths
84 further deaths from covid-19 were reported in the last 24 hours, making 500 in the last week and bringing the global fatalities in Spain up to 31,118 people.
Currently the cumulative incidence is 283.26 per 100,000 inhabitants across the last 14 days.
Hospital occupancy is 9.5% and occupancy of ICUs is 17% across the country; obviously there are significant regional differences in the percentages.
The Secretary of State for Health, Silvia Calzón, gave a press conference this Thursday after the meeting of the Covid-19 Technical Committee and announced that there are 832 more outbreaks since the last weekly update, which was on September 17th, with more than 5,600 positives. detected around these foci.
"80% of the outbreaks have a low transmission rate with around 10 related cases," said Calzón, although she clarified that those with the highest numbers of positives are those linked to vulnerable workers and the social and health sector.
Since the last update, the area in which the greatest number of both outbreaks and cases are linked, continues to be social, representing 33.4% of outbreaks and 30.9% of cases.
Outbreaks related to family and friends gathering (219 outbreaks and 1,337 cases) continue to cause concern. In addition, an increase in outbreaks in educational centers has been observed, accounting for 9.9% of outbreaks and 7.2% of cases. "The percentage is much lower than that of outbreaks in other social areas", she assured, while specifying that "these outbreaks in education are different incidents".
Calzón pointed out that the second wave that the country is facing is very different from what happened in March, since before the situation was very similar across the country in the different regions, whereas now the outbreaks are much more localized.