The day that the cities lagging furthest behind in Spain's coronavirus de-escalation have finally entered Phase 1 of the Sánchez government's four-phase plan, the graph of the evolution of the virus in the Spanish state points to hope. In the last 24 hours there have been 50 deaths, one of the lowest figures in recent days. But in addition, after updating and thoroughly reviewing the data, the Spanish health ministry has eliminated almost 2,000 deaths from its official total of fatalities accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic, with half of the deaths which have been deducted coming from Catalonia. Now the total is 26,834. Yesterday the Spanish government put the total at 28,752 dead in the state as a whole.
Daily coronavirus deaths in Spain
The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 has also been corrected downwards. The ministry has recalculated its totals and now gives an official figure of 235,400 cumulative cases, which is 312 less than yesterday's reported total of 235,772. The sum of new positive test results detected since yesterday also continues to move in the right direction. According to the ministry, 132 infections were reported yesterday.
.
Daily confirmed new cases of coronavirus in Spain
Catalonia warns that the data is wrong
The correction made by the Spanish health ministry particularly affects Catalonia, from whose total the central health authorities have deducted 1,126 deaths registered over the last two months. Yesterday, the Spanish figures said that 6,701 Covid-19 fatalities had taken place in Catalonia in the last two months of health emergency; today the figure has been cut to 5,575.
However, the Catalan health service sees it differently. According to the Catalan authorities, the data processing method used in Madrid has introduced a mistake - a new system for entering daily updates has just been imposed throughout the state, and Catalan health officials believe that the data entered this way has not been loaded correctly. They say they warned the Spanish ministry of the error and re-sent the data via the channel they have previously used, but it was not corrected.
This new data dispute follows controversy last week between the Spanish ministry and the Catalan health department due to the disarray of the official data on deaths and infections. On Friday, 635 new Covid-19 fatalities suddenly appeared in Catalonia's statistics, which, they explained, were not due to a resurgence but rather a correction of data over previous days. In response, Spanish health emergencies head Fernando Simón expressed his concern about the "inconsistencies" in the information they received from the Catalan authorities and spoke vaguely about an increase in cases in a specific area which he did not specify.
The Catalan health ministry rejected these allegations, with minister Alba Vergés denying that any problems had been observed in any specific area of Catalonia and assuring that the Spanish government had not conveyed this suggestion to them during private meetings between the two administrations.
Below, Total accumulated confirmed cases of Covid-19 by Spanish autonomous communities