In Spain, many contaminations for few hospitalizations

Nothing is going well in Spain? This Tuesday, August 18, the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, officially denied the rumor launched by a British media saying that the Spanish government would prepare a new confinement in Spain at the start of the school year. “It’s science fictionshe told Spanish reporters. At the moment the government does not plan a new confinement”, before adding that “no one knows what else can happen”. However, this rumor spread like wildfire. The reason ? The worrying figures of the number of Covid-19 contamination.

Since mid-July, the progression of the virus has accelerated and reached a level comparable to that of April 2020, i.e. in full containment. According to the Spanish Ministry of Health, 33,769 cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed last week, including 2,127 on August 17 alone.. Results superior to those recorded for example in France, which has 20 million more inhabitants and which lists between August 3 and 9 only 11,633 new cases. However, Spain is variously affected by the pandemic. Thus, almost a third of the country’s new weekly infections took place in Madrid, the capital of 6.6 million inhabitants where 14% of the Spanish population lives, i.e. 10,379 cases. The virus is also circulating in Catalonia which registers 5,166 new cases each week, as well as in Aragon which has 3,126.

Spanish paradox

These bad figures have earned him the finger of the finger by other European countries, such as the United Kingdom which imposes quarantine on all its nationals who have gone to Spain, or France and Germany which advise against traveling to certain regions. of the country due to the high circulation of the virus. With more and more uncontrolled spreads, the chief epidemiologist of the Spanish Ministry of Health, Fernando Simon, assured this August 10 that the transmission “is not perfectly controlled but gradually subsides.”

However, since the end of the confinement, it is the regional and autonomous governments that apply public health measures. According to El Paísalmost all governments have imposed the compulsory wearing of masks outdoors. According to the leading Spanish-language newspaper, the Community of Madrid is one of the last to have imposed it at the end of July. The capital region saw its contaminations jump by 413% at the end of July. Since then, it has imposed a closure of nightclubs at 1:30 a.m. and a ban on any gathering of more than 10 people, against 25 previously, for example.

Decisions not necessarily well received by a section of the population who regularly demonstrate against these bans which they consider disproportionate to the number of suffering people. This is where the paradox lies. Despite these bad figures, placing the country second in Europe – behind Russia – in the number of confirmed cases, Spain has recorded very few deaths. Last week, 1,096 people were hospitalized, 65 admitted to intensive care and 63 died. Figures comparable to those of early August in France, which in one week recorded 782 new hospitalizations, 122 intensive care admissions and 66 deaths in hospital or nursing homes. As in France, these new contaminations are above all the fact of the under 40s, and in particular of young adults. The Iberian kingdom has recorded 28,670 deaths, or 61.3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest rates in the world behind Belgium (86.3), Peru (82) and the United Kingdom (61.4 ).