Madrid accused of lying over death toll
MADRID • Spain’s government has been accused of hiding the death toll from coronavirus as it announces plans to welcome international tourists back to the country from July 1, or possibly in the second half of June.
The accusations of undercounting come amid changes to its method of reporting cases that saw its death toll plummet from around 50 per day last week to zero on Monday and Tuesday.
A change in the statistical methodology imposed by Spain’s health ministry on the regional authorities who run the country’s hospitals took effect last week, and among the bizarre results of the new system was the disappearance of 2,000 COVID-19 deaths to bring the national total down to just over 27,000.
Speaking in Congress, Pablo Casado, the opposition Popular Party leader, said the government of Pedro Sanchez, the prime minister, was lying about what he said was the worst coronavirus death rate in the world.
“You are hiding dead to conceal your incompetence,” Casado charged, citing an excess death number of 43,000 in Spain since March, as well as an estimate by the association of Spanish funeral companies of more than 44,000 dead during the epidemic. The instructions given out last month were to refine statistical records by individualizing each registration to avoid duplication, as well as only publishing deaths in the past 24 hours.
It led to a series of discrepancies and statistical results described as “nonsense” by Kiko Llaneras, a statistician and political analyst. The result, Llaneras said in a column in El Pais, was that Spain’s official death total, which rose by five on Thursday to 27,133, is now a false statistic.
“The figure is an underestimate because today we only know a portion of yesterday’s deaths because of delays.”
Salvador Illa, the health minister, said the change in methodology was due to the importance of focusing on new cases for rapid detection of fresh outbreaks now that the level of contagion was much lower than at the height of the epidemic.
“There may be, and I am sure there are, some mistakes,” Illa admitted.