ARCHIVED - Record number of deaths in 2020 as pandemic gripped Alicante province
Mortality rates in 2020 leapt 11 per cent in Alicante province on the Costa Blanca - the highest since the 1930s.
Alicante province recorded the highest increase in the number of fatalities in 2020 with 17,592 deaths, up 10.6 per cent on the previous year.
This increase, attributed directly to the Covid pandemic, is the highest surge in mortality over a 12-month period recorded since the Spanish Civil War, according to figures published by the National Statistics Institute (INE)
The number of deaths in Alicante province has grown year-on-year for the last 35 years, but experts are still shocked at the significant leap in such a short period of time, showing the "pandemic in all its crudeness", resulting in a rate of fatalities not seen in 80 years.
Analysts have compared the data to 1938 during the Civil War, when 12,848 people died in Alicante province, 13.3 per cent more than the previous year, but still short of the 17,592 deaths in 2020.
In the first year of the conflicts, there were 11,343 fatalities - a rise of 24 per cent on 1936, though it must be remembered that until 1974, the historical data on INE deaths published was collected based on the place the death was registered, not where the person lived or was born.
Therefore, it's likely that many of those recorded in 1937 and 1938 were "transients" who didn't actually live in Alicante province.
To give the data more perspective, in recent times, the closest increase was seen in 2012 and 2015, when increases of 6.72 and 6.56 per cent were recorded respectively - significantly lower than last year's rise in fatalities when the third wave of the pandemic claimed the most lives in December (1,728).
2020 began with fewer deaths in the province compared to the previous year, but as soon as the pandemic took hold the impact of the health crisis became apparent, and the toll continued to rise from March.
And according to INE data, the situation worsened in the first quarter of 2021, when Alicante province reportedly had one of the highest increases in mortality in Spain.
While the number of deaths has risen, the number of births has dropped, with 13,305 children born in Alicante province last year, a figure very close to a low of 12,811 registered in 1997.
This hasn't yet been attributed to the pandemic, though the number of newborns in January 2021 was the lowest recorded in 70 years.
IMAGE: Archive