Spain’s regions report just one coronavirus death in the last 24 hours

The Health Ministry reported just one coronavirus-related death in the last 24 hours on Saturday evening, with 67 fatalities due to Covid-19 over the last seven days. The official death toll since the crisis took hold in Spain stands at 27,135, but there are constant changes still being made to the data by the ministry.

For example, the Madrid region has reported 24 new coronavirus deaths in the last seven days, as well as 16 from Castilla y León and 11 from Asturias. But the total number of fatalities has not been altered by the ministry, given that the entire historical series is being revised.

While the totals are being updated, the accumulated number of deaths over the last seven days has started to rise once more after a falling trend since Wednesday: the daily numbers reported since June 3 are 63, 56 and 52, with 67 deaths reported on Saturday evening.

The accumulated number of deaths over the last seven days has started to rise once more

In terms of new cases, 332 were added to the series according to the ministry data released last night, with 164 – practically half – corresponding to the last 24 hours. In total, 241,310 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Spain via PCR testing.

Aragón’s data reflects a new outbreak among seasonal fruit-pickers in the area, with 13 new cases added to the list, 12 of which were detected the previous day. In Madrid, there were 159 new cases reported last night, 86 of them corresponding to the previous 24 hours. Navarre also saw 10 new cases.

On Friday, Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts, explained that with such low data, it was important to focus on other parameters, such as the number of cases where symptoms began seven days before diagnosis. This is a way to check whether early-detection systems are working properly. In this case, the information from the ministry shows that of the 332 new cases on the list, 265 were among people whose symptoms had begun a week previously, accounting for 80% of the total.

Another indicator being supplied by the Health Ministry is the rate for two different time periods of new cases per 100,000 inhabitants in each region. For 14 days, this figure came in yesterday at 11.25; for seven days, the number was 4.18. This descent has been a trend since the beginning of the week.

Hospitalizations – which are also being revised by the ministry – total 124,302 since the start of the crisis. On Friday the figure was 124,244. As well as 58 new admissions, a further 104 were reported from previous days. For intensive care unit (ICU) admissions, of the 168 reported, just 15 correspond to the prior seven days, a period during which just six of the 19 territories (17 regions plus the North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla) haven’t reported any at all.

The Health Ministry is also reporting a fairly constant number in terms of the identification of new suspected cases, which is usually around 10,000 a day but on Saturday’s report fell to around 7,000.

English version by Simon Hunter.