Epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic in Spain, the Madrid region admitted Thursday to be overwhelmed by the explosion in the number of cases and called on the central government for help, on the eve of the announcement of new restrictions.
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“The epidemic in the region of Madrid is getting worse, and we will have to make more efforts”, admitted Ignacio Aguadio, vice-president of this region of 6.6 million inhabitants.
Before asking the State to help the region cope with the rebound of the epidemic, in a very decentralized country where the regional authorities are responsible for health.
“It is necessary and urgent for the central government to get involved, and get firmly involved in the control of the pandemic in Madrid,” he added.
Madrid is the region whose situation worries the most in Spain as it concentrates a third of the new cases and deaths in the country and illustrates the comments made Thursday by the WHO’s European director on the “alarming” level of transmission in Europe .
According to the latest report from the regional authorities, the pressure on the health system is increasing with 2,850 people hospitalized, including 392 in intensive care. More than 20% of hospital beds are occupied by COVID patients.
The number of cases has exploded in certain districts or modest towns in the south of the capital where there are more than 1,000 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants over the past two weeks. An incidence much higher than the national average (285), which is already one of the highest in Europe.
Faced with this worsening of the situation, the regional authorities must announce new restrictions on Friday which should come into force from Saturday or Monday.
The purpose of these new measures will be “to restrict mobility and reduce activity in areas (…) where the highest transmission of the virus is observed”, because “we are in a situation of sustained growth” , explained the regional public health manager Antonio Ruiz Escudero.
“We must do everything we can to control the situation in Madrid”, where “we have perhaps the most important problem” of the country, declared for his part the Spanish Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, on public radio.
New containment?
The upcoming turn of the screw has caused confusion as the number two of Madrid’s health authorities explained on Wednesday that they were seriously considering targeted containments in the most affected neighborhoods.
An announcement that immediately aroused anxiety and questions in the areas concerned which are among the poorest in the region.
A new confinement “does not seem to me to be a good idea, for shops, small businesses, small bars, schools … People are already very stressed to be at home, the confinement has been very hard” in the spring, told AFP Maribel Quesada, a 55-year-old retiree living in the Puente de Vallecas neighborhood, one of the most affected neighborhoods in Madrid.
On Thursday, the authorities avoided uttering the word confinement in order to calm the concerns of a population already subjected in the spring to one of the strictest confinements in the world, during which the Spaniards were not allowed to leave their homes. them only to buy food and medicine, while the children were totally confined for weeks.
Spain, one of the European countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, this week exceeded 30,000 deaths and 600,000 confirmed cases, according to the government.
The rate of contagion has recently accelerated to the point of reaching 100,000 new cases in the past week.