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Spain's COVID-19 numbers possibly worse than reported

With funeral services overwhelmed by Spain’s coronavirus crisis, army vehicles transport the dead from hospitals in Madrid to three emergency morgues around the capital – two ice rinks and the shell of a never-used building meant to be the centre-piece of a “justice campus” that was scrapped amidst allegations of corruption and overspending.

According to the Spainish Health Ministry, casualties from COVID-19 are closing in on Italy as the world’s largest death toll from the pandemic. But, says a report in The Daily Telegraph authorities in towns and cities around the country paint an even darker picture in which the extent of the outbreak’s devastation could be far larger than official figures suggest due to an under-diagnosis of the virus.

“The average number of deaths in the province in March is barely 90, but this year there have been 250, and that is not even the final figure. Of those, only 30 were diagnosed with COVID-19,” said Carlos Martínez, the mayor of Soria, capital of Spain’s most sparsely populated province with 90,000 inhabitants.

Isabel Ayuso, Madrid’s regional president, revealed that some 3,000 out of Madrid’s 52,000 care home residents died in March, triple the number that would normally be expected in the month. The report says most were never tested for COVID-19 before dying – there simply wasn’t time.

The Spanish National Epidemiological Centre is tracking civil registry death notifications, with its latest report suggesting that deaths in the past two weeks were up by almost 8,000 on an average nationwide figure for this time of year, in keeping with official statistics on diagnosed COVID-19 cases. But spokesperson from the centre is quoted in the report as saying that it was likely that there was a logjam in data being received from some civil registers.

[link url="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/04/spains-secret-covid-19-death-toll-thousands-die-undiagnosed/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr"]Full report in The Daily Telegraph[/link]

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