Catalonia ‘not any longer’ top of European rankings in transmissions
UPC researcher says summer outbreaks helped authorities realize weaknesses, unlike other countries
A working group in Catalonia’s Polytechnic University (UPC), BIOCOMSC, is issuing three comprehensive reports every week on the latest Covid-19 data in Europe.
They have been comparing equivalent variables across several countries and regions since March, and Catalan News talked to one of the researchers in the group, Enric Álvarez.
Listen to this interview on episode two of Filling the Sink, the new podcast from Catalan News.
How is the pandemic progressing in Catalonia now?
At the minute the situation is improving in a very narrow sense. The growth rate of the epidemic was very high during the last weeks, [the transmission rate] was close to 1.4-1.5 and since the measures have been taken, now that we have a picture of what happened one week after they were taken, we've seen the rate drop to 1.1 [as of Nov 5, 0.95]. But it's still not under control and the incidence is very large, so the problems in hospitals are going to continue for some days, one week, two weeks at least, until it improves.
Do you think the second wave of Covid-19 has been different here compared to the rest of Europe?
In a sense Catalonia was different because, together with Spain, [the pandemic] rose first in summer and then was kept under control after the first rise. So we really noticed and felt more than others that our system of tracking cases was not ready, while the numbers that we're seeing in the Netherlands, in France show exactly the same picture, not being ready - but without having had ‘training’ before winter, so now the Netherlands, France, Belgium and other countries are facing that they really didn't have the system ready while in Catalonia and in Aragon and part of Spain we realized that in July, in June. So there's been some kind of catch up, and what's happening now is the wave has arrived in France, in the countries that opened earlier and the numbers are staggering. The situation right now in France, or in Czechia, or even in the Netherlands, they are really, really worrisome.