Madrid and Catalonia among regions who have not counted residential deaths forcing Spanish Government to change procedures for Coronavirus notification figures

THE Spanish government has modified the procedure for notification of Coronavirus infection and fatalities figures that the autonomous communities must send to the Ministry of Health.

The new instruction, which is published this Friday in the Official State Gazette, affects the data tables corresponding to information and the hiring of human resources and aims to ensure efficiency in managing the crisis caused by the coronavirus.

Madrid, Catalonia, Castilla y León, Galicia and Navarra only take into account deaths in hospitals with confirmed positives, leaving out at least thousands of deaths in residences.

According to the order, the communities must send between 8pm and 9pm the total number of deaths from since January 31, as well as the accumulated cases confirmed since that same date by means of diagnostic tests.

Also the number of people with and without symptoms at the time of the test and those who have been admitted to hospitals or other intensive care units.

Each community must report confirmed cases admitted to these units, hospital and homes, and diagnostic confirmations that have been carried out solely by means of antibody tests.

This category would also include infections already resolved at the time of notification, the order specifies, which also requires all public and private hospital centres with ICU beds, resuscitation or post-anaesthesia recovery to attend cases of Covid-19 to report the total number of beds in critical units with and without a ventilator and the number of admissions in conventional hospitalisation.

They must also account for the beds occupied by both infected and uninfected patients, the admissions and discharges by Coronavirus in the last 24 hours and the number of discharges expected in the next 24 hours.