The EU Justice Commissioner, Didier Reynders, presented the new map of the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) yesterday, where Spain appears in 'dark red', a highest risk area for Covid-19.
Right now, the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma, El Hierro) is the one with the best evolution of the coronavirus in the whole of Spain, and is the only one that presents a decrease in the number of cases and the accumulated incidence rates.
This comes after the worst weekend of the third wave in mainland Spain, with a record number of 93,822 new cases of Covid and 767 deaths, the worst figures in the third wave, and an accumulated incidence rate (IA14) that it is close to 900 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
All this on the day in which the European Commission has proposed to confine areas with an incidence rate of more than 500, and asked to create a new category, "dark red", in the epidemiological traffic lights to identify the areas at the highest risk. In addition, they advised against "non-essential" travel and suggested mandatory quarantine of between 10 and 14 days and a negative PCR test for all travellers from high-risk regions.
If the measures proposed by the EU are applied in Spain, the inhabitants of 38 of the 50 provinces would be confined, hence why Spain is now classed as "dark red". This means that Spain is now one of the hot spots in Europe for the transmission of the virus, and mobility to the country should be restricted, as several EU member states have done already.
The province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the one with the best evolution of the coronavirus at the moment in, not just the entire country, but Europe, with 104 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over 14 days (IA14). The decline in infections on the island, due to the severe restrictive measures implemented over Christmas and New Year, to which are added the good data from La Palma and La Gomera, and even El Hierro whose data has worsened in recent days but the island only has a small population.
The next Spanish province is Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Gran Canaria, Lazarote & Fuerteventura) with an IA14 of 192, proving that the Canary Islands are a safe destination and are doing well in controlling the spread of the virus, but how much better would the data be if the same restrictions over Christmas had applied there?
The only other provinces that would also be saved from seclusion are Asturias (308), Guipúzcoa (333), Álava (337), Cantabria (348), Lugo (353), Vizcaya (396), Ceuta (401), Navarra (402), Pontevedra (441), Huesca (451) and Burgos (498).
For territories with more than 500 cases, Brussels advises closing businesses, reinforcing tests, tracking infections and increasing the rate of sequencing of new strains, and advised against travelling to contain the expansion of the new strains.
In addition, it is demanding that pharmaceutical companies comply with the agreed delivery schedule of vaccines in the face of "unacceptable" delays; otherwise, the vaccination strategy, which aims to have 70% of the population immunized by the end of the summer, will be jeopardized if they don’t.
