With 323 000 cases recorded since the beginning of the epidemic, the country is the first in western Europe, and the eleventh in the world.
Seven weeks after having withstood the first assault of the outbreak of the new coronavirus, Spain finds itself in a situation “critical”, according to the experts, with the worst figures of contagion in western Europe.
Spain has informed on Monday an average of 4923 new cases daily during the last seven days, more than France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy combined, according to a calculation of the AFP from official sources.
With 323 000 cases, the country is the first in western Europe, the eleventh in the world, and is well ahead of its neighbours, with 108 cases per 100 000 inhabitants, compared with 28 in France, 18 in the United Kingdom, 13 in Germany and 8 in Italy. So well that more and more european countries impose a quarantine for travelers returning from Spain.
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A transmission is not “perfectly controlled”
It is a situation “critical, we are just at the point where things can improve or get worse (…) this implies the need to do everything possible and try to halt outbreaks before they escalate”, said to AFP Salvador Macip, professor in health sciences at the open University of Barcelona and author of the book “The great epidemics of modern”.
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Spain has seen blossom over 500 outbreaks of contagion since the first wave and more of a communal transmission, that is to say, we can’t find the original. This transmission “is not perfectly controlled, but is gradually declining”, assured Monday the epidemiologist-in-chief of the Health ministry, Fernando Simon.
Spain has put an end on the 21st of June in one of the confinements the most stringent in the world, where for weeks the population has been assigned to home. At this date The authorities recorded 238 new cases per day and an average of 8 cases per 100 000 inhabitants, far from the bounce statistics found since mid-July : what is it spent ?
An explosive cocktail
“there has been a lot of precipitation déconfiner, surely thinking in tourism”, a pillar of the Spanish economy, and considering, “that in the summer, with the heat, there would be less chance of having homes, which is said to come in the fall,” says Joan Cayla, chairman of the research Unit on tuberculosis of Barcelona, now dedicated to the study of the Covid-19.
But “the homes are appeared this summer, coinciding with the vacation of a portion of the health personnel”, says Cayla, which underlines that the bounce of the epidemiological was started two weeks after the déconfinement, the usual time for the contagion to appear in the statistics.
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For el Salvador Macip, other factors add to this explosive cocktail : the seasonal agricultural who are working in precarious conditions and who have been at the origin of several homes, and the “sagging” excessive population in a mediterranean culture prone to physical contact, and meetings of family and friends, may be “easier to avoid” in the north of Europe.
Three “weapons” are needed against the growth of contagions : to educate people for the month, multiply the tests, and hire staff to track down the contacts of infected persons, estimated the researcher, but there have been “failures” in all of these areas.
Multiplication tests
in the Face of these outbreaks of contagion, the regions, competent in matters of health, have taken drastic measures up to the sub-partials in the most affected areas in the north and North-East such as Catalonia, Aragon or the basque Country.
The mask has become mandatory in all public places, except in the Canary islands archipelago, and the many nightclubs, which are considered as accelerators of transmission, have been closed. Several regions have also released videos shocks to educate young people about the risks of contagion.
The government defends its work, recalling that the cases are increasing as the tests multiply (nearly 7.5 million a total of 407 000 in the last week), that more than half of new cases are asymptomatic, that the hospitals are far from saturated, and that “the case-fatality has decreased considerably”, as pointed out Monday, Dr. Simon.
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“Covid-19”, the new coronavirus
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In fact, Spain accounted for 950 deaths per day during the peak of the first wave, compared to 253 in total since the end of the confinement on the 21st of June, bringing the balance sheet to 28, 576.
