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Date Published: 17/01/2022
ARCHIVED - Spain begins key week for predicting the end of the sixth wave
Last week Spain experienced a consistent decrease in daily infections
On the anniversary of the peak of the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, health experts in Spain are hoping that the sixth wave will follow the same trend. Between January 16 and 17 last year the Ministry of Health believed the worst was over, and it is expecting the data in the coming days to verify that the health crisis is indeed slowing down.
“The speed of growth [of infections] has been reduced in the last week,” Health Minister Carolina Darias said last week. “It has not yet been confirmed, but it is beginning to manifest.”
Covid researcher Juan José Badiola has taken this a step further and claims that the peak was actually reached last weekend; furthermore, he believes that Spain will see a “very rapid” decrease in cases in the next two or three weeks as happened in South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first discovered.
These confident predictions are based on the fact that the growth rate of the 14-day cumulative incidence rate has slowed down considerably after jumping 100 points daily for some time. It’s true that it has increased from 2,989 cases on Monday to 3,192 on Friday, but many autonomous communities such as Valencia and Andalucía are well under the national average and the 7-day incidence rate remained under 50% for most of last week.
Likewise, the Ministry of Health has indicated a downward trend in the number of new infections, although the figures are likely to be somewhat skewed due to people not being required to confirm a Covid infection with an official PCR test. Nevertheless, the number of new cases dropped significantly between Monday and Friday, from 79,601 infections to 65,937.
The situation naturally varies greatly across communities: Navarra and the Basque Country still have an incidence of more than 6,500 cases while in Catalonia, 48% of ICU beds are occupied by Covid patients. On the other hand, Madrid has already announced the peak of its sixth wave after experiencing a 16% decrease in cases last week, while the president of the Valencian Community, Ximo Puig, predicts a “quite important and rapid” decline in the coming days.
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