Spain toll crosses 900 for second day in a row
MADRID: Spain is closing a black week on Friday with its death toll from the new coronavirus nearing 11,000, more than half of it in the past seven days, and more infections than any other country in Europe.
Spain on Friday registered 932 new deaths, 18 less than its singleday record of 950 the day before.
The bottleneck in labs conducting the tests has led to relatively low levels of testing in Spain compared to other European countries, authorities have acknowledged.
But even with statistics that are believed to be conservative in showing the extent of the epidemic, Spain on Friday neared 118,000 cases. Official health ministry data showed that 7,472 of those infections took place in the past 24 hours.
Italy saw the number of new coronavirus cases and deaths stabilising on Friday, as officials express optimism that a fourweek lockdown is beginning to check Europe’s worst outbreak.
Fatalities over the past 24 hours rose 766, compared with Thursday’s 760 deaths, to 14,681, civil protection authorities said at their daily news conference in Rome. They reported 4,585 new infections compared with 4,668 the previous day. Italy now has 119,827 total cases.
The pace of both new deaths and new infections has flattened out over past days, even as the containment measures shuttering all non-essential activities and banning most movement take a heavy toll on the economy.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday returned to work at the chancellery after two weeks in quarantine at home following an encounter with a doctor who tested positive for coronavirus.
Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said that Merkel was returning to her office on Friday after the recommended 14-day precautionary quarantine. He said she “tested negative for the coronavirus several times”.
The head of Lothar Wieler of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control agency, said the number of people who die of Covid-19 is likely being undercounted. According to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University, Germany had almost 85,000 confirmed cases and 1,107 deaths by Friday.