Data On Spanish Care Home Deaths Is Unreliable

By Eleisha Kennedy • 07 July 2020 • 19:05

The number of deaths in Spanish care homes is estimated between 27,359 and 32,843, but the Ministry of Health admit that the data is unreliable. CREDIT: Twitter

The poor quality of the data sent by the Spanish Autonomous Communities has made it difficult to calculate the exact number of deaths in the country’s care homes.

The Spanish Ministry of Health acknowledges that the poor quality of the data on care home deaths provided by the Autonomous Communities during the pandemic has made it difficult to interpret it, with one community failing to provide any data at all. The total figure of deaths in care homes ranges from 27,359 to 32,843.

A report, containing data up to June 20, records 27,359 deaths in care homes: 9,003 of these (32.9% of the deaths) were directly attributed to Covid-19, in 9,830 cases Covid symptoms were detected but not confirmed (35.9%) and the rest (31.2%) were attributed to other causes.

The document admits the difficulties to input the data on the Information System platform, dubbed as “not user friendly”, as well as numerous errors regarding the number of care home residents and the number of deaths.

It also points out that one community did not send any data whatsoever, others failed to send it with the required frequency or sent it after the deadline.