Spain is among the countries with the most infections in August, at the level of Bolivia, the United States or Brazil

Spain shares the color red with countries such as Bolivia, the United States and Brazil in the classification published this Tuesday by the scientific journal

, which means that community transmission is "very high."

The publication uses data from

to classify 91 States based on the coronavirus infections they suffered in the month of August.

It considers that transmission is very high when it exceeds 100 daily cases per million inhabitants.

Spain is the tenth country with the most transmission: 118.8 new cases per million inhabitants per day.

There is no other European country with worse data.

They are followed by Malta (80.9) and Romania (61.6), which the magazine places in the classification as countries with “high” transmission.

In France, transmission was "moderate", with 45.2 infections per million inhabitants.

Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom fall into this category, but with lower rates of infections.

Italy, for example, had 11.4 infections per million inhabitants in August.

The epidemiologist Daniel López Acuña, former director of emergencies for the World Health Organization (WHO), relativizes the classification: “Compare pears with apples.

Not all countries do the same accounts or do the same number of PCR tests ”, he assures.

"To make a valid comparison, it would be necessary to have rates adjusted for age and for the number of PCR performed", he adds. And this also assuming that the definition of the case was uniform. But he warns: "That does not prevent us from saying that the situation in Spain is serious, it is worrying, and that we do not need to compare pears and apples as the table does to know that we must act more decisively and forcefully to stop the pandemic. ”In his opinion, the report does not say more“ than already we know and we need to know in order to take a turn in the management of the pandemic in Spain ”.

In addition to incidence, the report also offers other indicators, such as the death rate, expressed in deaths per million inhabitants per day.

In Spain they were 0.5 in August, a figure far removed from the 5.7 in Bolivia, 4.4 in Brazil or 3 in the United States.

In this indicator, Spain is similar to other European countries such as Belgium (also with 0.5), although it is still far from the figures for Italy (0.2) or Germany (0.1).

The reproduction rate (R0), which indicates whether the epidemic is growing or decreasing, is 1.4 in Spain, when it should be below 1 if the situation were contained.

Only Uganda has a higher rate: 1.5.

With it, Cuba, Tunisia and Ireland were in the month of August.

The Lancet

notes that 19 countries were able to achieve the “suppression” of the epidemic in August, including China, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Luxembourg, Finland and Cuba.

"Ten of the 19 are in the Asia-Pacific region, the one that is best controlling the epidemic," the report highlights.

In the opposite case, that of the highest number of infections (where Spain appears), 6 of the 11 countries belong to the American region.

The report also alerts about another indicator, the number of tests per positive case.

In most countries with high and very high transmission, there are low levels of testing (less than 20).

“This low level is both cause and effect.

Insufficient testing and tracking leads to higher transmission, and high transmission overwhelms the limited testing and tracking capacity, ”the magazine explains.

Information about the coronavirus

- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic

- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy

- Download the tracking application for Spain

- Search engine: The new normal by municipalities

- Guide to action against the disease