Spain is European leader for new COVID infections, with 600% more in the last month

Spain is the European leader for the number of new COVID infections per million inhabitants, with 600% more in the last month.

One month ago, Spain had managed to fully vaccinate 79.1% of the population and had just 129 daily new COVID infections per million inhabitants. The Public Health Committee then decided to make its traffic light system more flexible and raise the figures considered “of risk”, having considered that the incidence, which had been increasing for days, was not so indicative of the state of the COVID situation with such a high vaccination rate.

A day later, on November 24, the South African health authorities notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) that they had detected a new variant of coronavirus. The omicron variant spread rapidly through the countries of the European Union.

Evidence of the high transmissibility of omicron is that 47.2% of the COVID samples sequenced between December 6 and 12 in Spain were associated with omicron, according to preliminary data from the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies.

On December 23, just before Christmas Eve, Spain beat its record for daily infections for the third day in a row after detecting 72,912 new cases, with more than 900 new cases per million people, which is 600% more than a month ago.

No neighbouring country has recorded such an increase in infections in the last 30 days. In Italy, which had values similar to Spain at the end of November (163.43 per million inhabitants), daily cases have only increased to around 200% (494), the same as in France, where daily cases have gone from 296.12 to 906.97.

Other countries such as Austria, Belgium or the Netherlands, where on November 23 they had more than 1,000 new cases per million people, have reduced this number by 84%, 52% and 40% respectively. Germany has also managed to reduce the number from 633.06 to 402.18 cases, 36% less.

Despite this, the country that had the highest number of daily new cases per million inhabitants this Thursday was the United Kingdom (1,411.25), followed by Denmark, Ireland and Switzerland, which are also above a thousand. Spain was in the sixth position, behind France, and followed by Slovakia and Cyprus.

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