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ARCHIVED - ICUs in Spain enter high risk: Covid update January 3
Spain’s cumulative incidence rate exceeds 2,000 for first time ever
The world has emerged from the Christmas and New Year celebrations registering almost 1.5 million new cases daily, and Spain is breaking dubious records of its own, registering the highest cumulative incidence rate of the entire pandemic.
Health experts have cautioned that the figures may be even higher due to delays in reporting over the holidays, a worrying fact given that the United States alone registered more than a million infections on January 3, the highest number so far around the world.
Cumulative incidence rate
Spain’s 14-day figure has breached the 2,000 barrier for the first time since the health crisis began and on Monday, stood at 2,295 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. This is a dramatic increase of 520 infections since Thursday, the last day when the data was released by the Ministry of Health.
All of the Spanish communities now exceed 1,000 cases per 100,000, with Navarra (5,523), the Basque Country (4,142), Aragon (3,440) and Castilla y Leon (3,167) hanging on to the top spots.
Bringing up the rear, with just 1332 and 1482 cases respectively, are the north African enclave of Melilla and Andalucía.
The Region of Murcia (1,529) and the Valencian Community (1,600) both remain below the national average.
The age groups with the highest cumulative incidence are those between 20 and 29 years (3,639) and between 30 and 39 (3,066).
Coronavirus infections
A total of 372,776 new infections were reported throughout Spain over the weekend, 34,876 of which were diagnosed in the last 24 hours. These figures are far higher than on the same day last week, when 212,619 cases were registered and bring the total number of infections since the beginning of the pandemic to 6,667,511.
In the past two weeks, a total of 1,088,177 positives have been registered.
Hospitalisations
There are currently 12,339 patients hospitalised for Covid, 1,571 more than last Thursday. The percentage of beds occupied by coronavirus patients is 10.10% (on Thursday it was 8.81%), and there are 1,974 people in the ICU (171 more patients).
In the last 24 hours there have been 1,641 admissions and 738 discharges.
The average occupancy of ICUs in Spain, at 21.18%, has catapulted the country’s hospitals into the high-risk category (between 15% and 25%), with only Extremadura and Galicia still at the low-risk level.
Andalucía remains at medium risk with 10.97% occupancy; the Region of Murcia is at high risk while the Valencian Community is now at the very high risk, with 25.78%.
On Tuesday January 4, the director of the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, Antoni Castells, predicted that Spain will have reached its peak of infections within 10 days, but he warned that at the moment, hospitals are experiencing a “complicated” situation and that the Omicron variant is leading to “problems” with staff shortages.
Fatalities
A further 168 people have lost their lives to Covid compared to 120 last Monday, bringing the total death toll in Spain to 89,573.
Vaccination data
To date, 90.3% of the population over 12 years (38,016,879 people) have already received the complete vaccination schedule while 92.2% (38,843,048 people) have received one dose, according to the report published this Monday by the Ministry of Health.
So far, 10,988,203 people have received a booster dose, which at the moment is being administered to people living in elderly residences, those aged over 60 years, health care workers and individuals who originally received the Janssen jab.
Tuesday’s report indicates that 964,215 children aged between 5 and 11 years have already been inoculated with the paediatric vaccine.
Image: Ximo Puig Twitter
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