Minister of Health: ‘All the data indicates that we have bent the curve’

The Spanish Government are starting to consider that the sixth wave of Covid is coming to an end, as confirmed yesterday by the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, who said “the onslaught of omicron is closer than ever. All the data indicates that we have bent the curve." She has asked for prudence but added that "the downward trend of the data is being consolidated day by day".

The daily update of the data for Spain (which includes the Canary Islands data) continues to confirm the decline that began last week. The incidence rate fell by 61 points compared to Thursday, and remained at 3,078 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over 14 days.

Since Monday, this indicator has fallen 303 points in Spain as a whole and has fallen for five days in a row. In addition, the fact that the 7-day incidence is now at 1,306, which is less than half of the 14-day one, allows the Health department to predict that this decline will continue.

On January 17th, the incidence began to stabilize at around 3,400 cases, after eleven consecutive weeks of huge increases. Omicron has been shown to be a much more contagious variant than the previous ones, but “less virulent”, confirmed Darias, something that can be deduced from the improvement in hospital pressure in the mainland.

According to SCS data, there are 18,548 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 and of these, 2,099 are in ICU. 14.85% of the total beds and 22.16% of ICU beds are occupied by Covid patients. The peak of hospitalizations of this sixth wave (on January 24^th), were 15.76% in wards and 23.94% in intensive care, which seem to be being left behind.

The drop in incidence is a direct result of the decrease in new infections, which have also begun to fall progressively this last week. Health registered 118,922 new infections yesterday, and the week closed with an average of 125,000 new cases per each day, below the 150,000 that were detected per day in the previous week.

But the high number of deaths is still a reminder of the devastating effects of the sixth wave, with an investigation underway as to why the numbers are so high in the Canary Islands compared to other regions.

There were 1,225 deaths in Spain this week, a record number since the third wave, and total death toll since the start of the pandemic stands now at 92,966, according to official statistics.

The improvement of the data opens the doors for the Government to start planning to downgrade the pandemic to an endemic, and Darias confirmed that work is starting on proposals for a change in the observation of the pandemic, from ‘emergency surveillance’ to ‘surveillance by objectives’, although the minister made it clear that this will not happen until the sixth wave has completely passed, which is several weeks away.

At that point many restrictions are expected to be lifted, such as having to wear masks everywhere outdoors, or capacities and closing times, but they won’t be lifted altogether until the pandemic is completely declared to be over as a health emergency.