Madrid | The Spanish Ministry of Health assured Thursday that Spain was not facing a second wave of the coronavirus epidemic, despite a notable increase in COVID-19 cases in recent days.
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“I wouldn’t be talking about a second wave” until “we have community transmission out of control” and it is clear that the increase in detected cases is not simply due to the increase in tests performed, said Fernando Simon, chief epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health.
According to the ministry’s daily bulletin, Spain has registered 19,405 cases of COVID-19 in the past seven days, a daily average of 2,772.
A week ago the average was 1,913 per day and it has two weeks 1,460.
The most affected regions are Catalonia (northeast), with more than 5,100 cases diagnosed over the last seven days, and neighboring Aragon, with 4,100 cases. But the latter region is the most worrying with the highest rate of cases in the country, 312 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon, “remains the most affected area”, although we have observed in recent days “a stabilization of the cases detected”, continued Dr. Simon.
According to him, despite the increase in cases, there is “no risk of collapse” of the hospital system, unlike what happened in some places at the height of the epidemic.
The resurgence of contagion has led the regional authorities to decree partial confinements, as in Catalonia and Aragon but also in other regions.
On Friday, Aranda del Duero, a city of more than 32,000 inhabitants in the region of Castile-Leon (north-west), will be confined for 14 days to limit the contagion.
The whole of Spain had experienced strict confinement from mid-March to June 21, but the government ruled out the possibility of resorting again to this state of exception.
Spain, one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, has so far counted 310,000 cases and 28,500 deaths.