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ARCHIVED - Covid fatalities in Spain believed to be nearer 58,000 then the official 34,000 reported
The figure is 23,000 higher than the number of deaths officially attributed to coronavirus
Data published by the Spanish government’s central statistics unit (INE)this week show that so far this year the number of deaths in this country has reached 384,618, representing an excess of 57,817 over the figure which was recorded in the same period in 2019, the suspicion being that the increase has been caused largely, if not entirely, by the Covid-19 pandemic.
This finding contrasts with the official data supplied by the Ministry of Health, which reports that the official number of deaths attributable to coronavirus in the 41 weeks up until 11th October was 34,210, and this is logically being linked to the Covid-19 situation enveloping the world this year.
Data regarding deaths is gathered and published by various sources, the two most widely used and regognised as reliable being the INE which examines the deaths reported by death certificates in the civil registries of Spain and the Mortality Monitoring System in Spain (MoMo), of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), which gathers information provided by the 3,929 computerized civil registries of the Ministry of Justice from all over Spain.
Their compiled figures are normally used to produce fairly accurate figures relating to the flu deaths in Spain, which are similar to the covid situation in that some of the deaths occur in the home environment or in carehomes and not in hospitals, so in order to gather data assessing how effective the vaccinations programme has been each year for example, they examine the percentage of deaths over and above what could normally be expected at any given time and compare them against the flu spikes (the flu season starts in week 40 of a given year and ends in week 20 of the following year but usually peaks in specific weeks depending on the weather and strain of flu), and using this methodology they can generate very accurate estimates of the total number of deaths attributable to flu, which in Spain most years hovers around the 4,000 mark.
The INE and Carlos III use different methodologies. While the National Institute of Statistics compares the current estimated data with those registered in previous years, the MoMo system performs a calculation of the expected mortality based on those previous records. Some experts consider the Carlos III projections more reliable, but others warn that their model is underestimating the deaths of the second wave, since the magnitude of the first wave distorts later calculations. 'El País' reported this Wednesday that Carlos III is going to review its model after detecting said underestimation.
The data produced by the INE has been updated several times since the first wave and this latest set of figures includes the first figures published this spring.
It is known for a fact that many of the early covid deaths during the first wave of the pandemic were not correctly designated as being covid deaths, the principal reason for this being that only cases which had been diagnosed by PCR are included in the official statistics. In the first months of the pandemic, PCR tests were not widely available, and PCR testing was only being undertaken in hospitals when patients were being admitted with severe symptoms. Thousands of elderly people are known to have died in care homes throughout Spain and at home without ever having been tested; indeed the first deaths in carehomes were not diagnosed as being due to covid until several weeks later when blood tests were analysed after the high number of pneumonia-related deaths in carehomes was queried, by which time there were thousands of cases in carehomes and the pandemic was out of control.
Statistics produced from other sources have also correlated the INE data; for example data produced by the 5,547 care homes of Spain, through the regional governments, which was published in the middle of September relating to the first wave of the pandemic
Their figures stated that 20,058 residents died in care homes during the first wave of the covid crisis from covid, although most of these were not PCR tested, so therefore the Ministry of Health and WHO refuse to include them in the official figures, but, they do tie in with the excess death figures of the MoMo and NIE.
Further analysis of the latest data published shows that the number of women dying at the age of 90 or over has increased by 10,982 in comparison with the same period last year, while the figure for men in the same age group has risen by 5,711. Between the ages of 85 and 89 the numbers are up by 7,200 for women and 5,593 for men, while in the 80- to 84-year-old group the increases are 3,591 and 3,994 respectively.
The increase for men is again greater than that for women in the group of people between the ages of 75 and 79: 5,497 as opposed to 3,010.
The week-by-week statistical analysis of deaths being carried out by the government unit is an ongoing project of no fixed duration, although given the current situation it is anticipated that it will last at least a year. The means of analysis are being developed and refined while the study continues, and those responsible point out that all of the figures should be treated as provisional due to the difficulties in compiling fully accurate and comparable data. It will be impossible they say, to ever accurately identify every single covid death, but the availability of detailed statistical data relating to the number of deceased in Spain historically, will help to form a very close estimate of the final count.
There is, however, no doubt that the number of deaths attributable to Covid-19 is considerably higher than the official statistics being reported on a daily basis, (yesterday this figure was 34,366 as Spain passed the one million cases mark) and that it is highly likely that the majority of the 58,000 deaths reported as being “excess deaths”are, for the main part, attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic.