FREE
www.costablancapeople.com
1
CostaBlancaPeople 16th - 22nd November 2021
16th - 22nd nOVEMbEr - EditiOn 916
Tel: 607 031 113 | claire@costablancapeople.com | costablancapeople.com
Your Essential Weekly read
Spain to avoid sixth wave
After a good start to the autumn, with the best coronavirus indicators in more than a year, the positive trend in Spain has taken a turn. the national 14-day incidence rate fell to its lowest point in mid-October, with 40 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, and since then, it has been slowly rising. it broke the 50-mark, considered “low risk” on 4th november
at the end of last week it reached 67 cases per 100,000. despite the success of Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination drive – 88.9 percent of the over-12 population is fully vaccinated, according to the health Ministry – there are growing concerns about the delicate situation in many other European countries. Germany,
Austria and the netherlands, which have lower vaccination rates than Spain, are reporting the highest daily number of coronavirus cases seen since the beginning of the pandemic. Fatalities for Covid-19 are also rising in these countries. the question many are asking now is if Spain is on the brink of a sixth wave – but thankfully experts believe
not. “the situation in Europe is a bit scary and the data in Spain are not good, given the indicators are rising. but i would not call what is happening here a wave,” explains Quique bassat, an epidemiologist and researcher at the Catalan institution for research and Advanced Studies (iCrEA) at the iSGlobal institute in barcelona. “the rise is not that explosive, the impact on the health system is not significant, and nor is it likely to be, thanks to the vaccines. it’s more of an uptick that is rising slowly and that we must monitor now to see how it evolves.” Clara Prats, a researcher of Computational biology at Catalonia’s Polytechnical University (UPC), expects that “cases are going to continue to rise for at least two more weeks.” She adds: “it’s more difficult to specify beyond that, although the advantage we have in Spain is that it has been the last country to see a rise and we can compare ourselves to those where it happened earlier and have similar vaccination rates.
See page 12
One example is denmark. What we are seeing there is that the rise in cases has been significant but sustained since September, when they removed the last restrictions.” Experts say that the improvement in vaccination coverage, with respect to the previous waves, is reason to be confident that the indicators will not worsen too much. “in June, when the fifth wave began, we had two important weak points that we have now overcome,” says Clara Prats. “the younger population was not vaccinated [now nearly 80 percent of teenagers and the 20-29 age group are fully immunised], which allowed the virus to spread at great speed. And many people aged between 60 and 69 who had been vaccinated with AstraZeneca still had not received the second dose, which significantly increased the number of serious cases and hospitalizations among them,” she explains, in reference to the 12-week interval between the first and second shot of the OxfordAstraZeneca vaccine. “this is not going to happen again.”