'Stronger measures' if pace of transmissions continue, warns president

The Catalan president, Quim Torra, warned that if the pace of Covid-19 transmissions continues as they have been in the past few weeks, enhanced measures will have to be introduced like during the peak of the pandemic.

"We ask all citizens for maximum caution in order to protect ourselves from Covid-19," he tweeted on Wednesday. "We are in a complex situation and if the progression, that today we have analysed in our meeting, continues, we will have to enforce stronger measures again."

Mass screenings

The number of targeted mass screenings to identify asymptomatic cases is spreading across Catalonia lately – the figures are not dramatically increasing like a few weeks ago, but remain high and slightly on the rise.

The new diagnoses by PCR and epidemiological tests every day are roughly between 500 and 1,000, at similar levels of July but have not returned to the 100-200 seen during most days in June. In March and April, the new daily diagnoses usually oscillated between 1,200 and 2,000.

Outbreak risk and transmission rate

Another figure that concerns authorities is the outbreak risk: while in June it remained below the 'low' threshold, at 30 points in the iEPG index, it increased exponentially in July up to 202, way past the 'high' threshold, at 100.

In late July and early August, it decreased, but for some days it stabilized with a slight increase in the trend at around 150, still considered a 'high' risk.

The outbreak risk is calculated by multiplying the average spread of the virus over the past seven days by the cumulative incidence over the past two weeks.

The transmission rate, that is, the average number of people each Covid-19 patient is transmitting the virus, stays just above 1 (in the August 10-16 week, it was 1.06). After staying below 1 for part of May and June, the variable spiked to 1.81 in mid-July.

Positive PCR tests per 100,000 inhabitants

As for the number of diagnoses confirmed by PCR test per every 100,000 inhabitants, an index useful to compare countries, the figure has stayed at 77 for the whole of August. Its peak was 152 in late March, then fell to 6 in June, and spiked again at 86 in July.

Hospitals, less busy than in spring

Yet, authorities are not especially concerned with the situation in hospitals now: 671 people with Covid-19 were hospitalized on August 19, far from the peak of the crisis, and 125 patients are in ICUs, less than 10% than in the worst days of the pandemics (1,529).

Similarly, the number of deaths per day in the summer outbreaks is completely different compared to four months ago: rarely are fatal victims more than 10 in a single day now, while in early April it was not strange to see this figure at over 200.

The authorities have focused on leisure, restaurants, and nightlife in the new measures enforced lately to stop the spread of coronavirus. The reason is that the average age of the new diagnoses is much lower than in the spring: while the average patient in the whole pandemic has been 52.8 years in Catalonia, in the last week it was 38.64, and the figure has been below 40 for several weeks.