Catalonia has close to 1,000 covid patients in hospital
Catalan Minister of Health meets main cities' officials to address new restrictions
BarcelonaThe explosion of covid-19 cases has already reached hospitals and Catalonia has almost 1,000 patients in hospital, the highest figure for two months. The Department of Health has reported 104 more hospital admissions in the past hours, meaning there are already 980 patients on the ward. In addition, 22 more patients have been moved to intensive care units (ICU), taking the total to 182, mostly aged between 44 and 49 and 60 and 69 and having received either only one dose o no doses of the vaccine.
The new measures are intended to help control an surge in contagions not seen in Europe. As explained to Catalunya Ràdio by the professor in pharmacoepidemiology of the University of Oxford Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, the fifth wave of the pandemic is growing in Catalonia at a much faster rate than in countries such as the United Kingdom. "It is a growth that we had never seen until now," said the expert, who has linked it to the delta variant, which is more contagious, the easing of restrictions in late June and people wanting to "meet up again", especially the young.
Thus, despite the fact that the Department of Health has stopped testing asymptomatic close contacts, the number of positive cases continues to rise and 5,503 new cases of covid-19 have been recorded in the past 24 hours, taking the total to 721,693 since the beginning of the pandemic, 42,000 of them in the past week. The 14-day cumulative incidence continues to rise, from 753.91 to 848.17 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Eighteen percent of the tests in the last week have come back positive. No new deaths have been reported in the last 24 hours and the total since the beginning of the pandemic remains at 22,283
On the other hand, the rate of spread of the virus (Rt) is down again for the fourth consecutive day, and stands at 1.93, 47 hundredths less than the previous day, which means that every 100 infected people infect an average of 193 people. Effective potential growth has also begun to de-escalate and is down 168 points to 1,590, after reaching a record high of 1,808 a week ago.
