Several agents control the interior of a Cercanías train in the vicinity of the Entrevías station in Madrid.
Bald Elm
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The curve of coronavirus infections in Spain advances unstoppably: 76,441 new infections in the last week.
The Ministry of Health has notified 12,274 more cases this Friday compared to Thursday's count, 4,122 of them diagnosed in the last 24 hours.
The health impact of this drip of new infections does not reach the levels of collapse experienced during the first wave of March, but the healthcare pressure begins to crystallize: 40% of the beds - structural and adapted from other units - that provide services of intensive care in the Community of Madrid, which this Friday extended the radius of impact of its social and mobility restrictions to another eight health areas, are already occupied by patients with covid-19.
The incidence of cases in Spain —282 cases per 100,000 inhabitants— has contracted slightly in the last three days, but remains at extremely high levels, double that of mid-August.
Some communities, such as Madrid (721) or Navarra (662), comfortably double the Spanish average.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health has reported 716,481 people infected by coronavirus and 31,232 deaths - 114 more than this Thursday - although these figures could be higher because the Government only calculates in its statistics people with a diagnostic test that confirms your infection.
The worst-off community in all parameters continues to be Madrid: it has the highest level of infection, the highest healthcare pressure and the highest number of deaths.
"Tough weeks are coming," the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, advanced on Thursday, regarding the situation in the capital and its region.
It is not only the number of infections - of the 4,112 diagnosed this Thursday, a thousand were in this community - but the impact it already has on the health system: with primary care on the brink of collapse, hospitals in the capital are beginning to fill their floors: a quarter of the beds are occupied by patients with covid-19 and 40% of the intensive care units (ICU) have already been filled.
Precisely, the regional government has decided this Friday to extend the mobility and social interaction limitations that weighed on 37 health areas of the community to eight other areas of the territory to stop the uncontrolled transmission of the virus.
Minister Illa, however, was in favor of a more forceful response and extending social and mobility restrictions to the entire community.
But Madrid is not the only hot spot in the fight against the coronavirus.
Catalonia, which is in a more solvent situation by registering a cumulative incidence of 150 cases per 100,000 inhabitants after 14 days, has hurried to intensify social restrictions and has just reduced the maximum number of people who can meet in social gatherings from 10 to six public or private.
Castilla y León, which has an incidence of 371 infected per 100,000 people, has just announced the confinement, again, of Miranda de Ebro, due to the increase in cases: the Burgos municipality, of 30,000 inhabitants, registers an incidence of 1,180 infected by 100,000 people.
In the whole of Spain, there are 11,006 people admitted because of covid-19, which represents an occupation of 8%.
In intensive care units there are 1,145 patients, almost a thousand more than last week, and the overall occupancy is 17%, although this calculation includes both the structural beds of the ICU and all those places in other units adapted during the pandemic to treat critical patients.
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