Spain Is First Western European Country To Pass 1M Covid Cases
Source: The Guardian
Six weeks after becoming the first western European country to record 500,000 coronavirus cases, Spain has become the first to record a million, registering a total of 1,005,295 infections by Wednesday evening. It has also recorded 575 deaths over the past week, bringing the official number of Covid deaths to 34,366.
The unwelcome landmark comes as the Spanish government mulls a curfew and as political bickering and grandstanding threaten to jeopardise the country’s efforts to tame the second wave of the virus. The government of the Madrid region, which accounts for almost a third of all Spain’s cases, has been locked in a quarrel with the central government over how to deal with the rise.
Speaking on Wednesday morning, the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, promised “surgical measures to bring together the economy and health”, adding: “For us, the most important thing is that the economy doesn’t suffer any more.” Díaz Ayuso’s comments came three days after she unveiled a new plaque dedicated to the memory “of the victims of Covid-19 and especially those who died alone”.
It now hangs on the facade of the regional government’s headquarters in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square, alongside two other memorials to calamatous events in the history of the city: the brutally suppressed rebellion against Napoleon’s troops in 1808, and the 2004 train bombings that killed 193 people. Admirable though the sentiment and the newest plaque are, they feel remarkably premature. The dying is not done and the second wave of the virus rages on.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/21/spain-first-western-european-country-to-pass-1-million-covid-cases
Explanations for Spain's 'suboptimal response' are not hard to find: as the Lancet journal points out, the country’s health services were badly weakened by the austerity that followed the 2008 economic crash and remain “understaffed, under-resourced and under strain”.
The strict lockdown that helped flatten the first wave of the virus was abandoned too soon amid dire economic warnings and a rush to return to a summer of normality, and test-and-trace systems – especially in Madrid – have shown themselves to be woefully inadequate.
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