More than 1 in every 100 in Spain test positive for COVID-19 in one week
This unprecedented figure comes as nearly 162,000 more people tested positive in a day, shattering the previous record of around 101,000, Anadolu Agency reports.
In Navarre, the region with the highest infection rate in Europe, one out of every 36 people has tested positive for the virus in the last week.
The pressure in hospitals continues to grow, with 9% of all hospital beds and 19% of intensive care units now occupied by COVID-19 patients.
As infections show no signs of slowing down days before New Year’s Eve celebrations, doctors and experts are increasingly worried.
«Last week, we had four patients with COVID-19 with bilateral pneumonia in our ICU. Today, there are eight in our 12 beds. We’ll see how many more come in next week and how many beds will be left to treat other diseases,» tweeted Carlos Velayos, an intensive care doctor in Madrid.
The warning comes just as a court in the Canary Islands rejected the government's proposal to set curfews for the upcoming holidays.
This unprecedented wave of infections comes even though 90% of people older than 12 years old in Spain are vaccinated. A further 80% of people older than 60 years old have received a booster.
However, freshly published data that examines Spain’s situation until Dec. 19 shows that vaccinated people are much less likely to become infected, be hospitalized or die from the disease.
In 60 to 79-year-olds, for example, non-vaccinated people were six times more likely to have been infected, 15 times more likely to be hospitalized and 19 times more likely to die.
In those aged 12 to 29, non-vaccinated people were twice as likely to have caught the virus and nine times more likely to end up in intensive care.
