Friday, March 29

ICU occupancy falls below 5% in the first data after the change in COVID management

The Ministry of Health has published the first report of the new strategy against COVID-19. In this way, not only the daily notification of new infections or the cases of accumulated incidence of the coronavirus -which has been notified on Tuesdays and Fridays for two weeks- is put to an end, but from now on the surveillance of the disease it will focus on “higher vulnerability” people.

This Friday, Health provides the incidence rate of the coronavirus in people over 60 years of age, which registers 459.27 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, as well as reporting 43,265 new infections since the last update on Tuesday. In addition, the percentage of occupancy in the ICU falls below 5%, which corresponds to a situation of ‘controlled circulation’, according to the last COVID Traffic Light approved in November.




With this new pandemic notification formula, it is intended to update the report on a weekly basis, and the results of the self-diagnosis tests will not be considered. Thus, the surveillance will be based on “the notification of confirmed cases of people with vulnerability factors or associated with it and of serious cases”, as elDiario.es already announced at the end of February. The objective is a transition, after the “acute phase of the pandemic” towards monitoring through ‘sentinel networks’, such as those for the flu.




The number of deaths from COVID-19 increases to 102,541 deaths since the start of the pandemic, with 323 deaths reported since Tuesday. Meanwhile, hospital data, which is reported in a similar way to previous reports, continues its downward trend: in addition to occupancy in ICUs, the general occupancy of beds in hospitals by COVID patients decreases, which goes from 3, 52% to 3.34%, as well as the total number of people admitted with coronavirus, which drops to 4,150.




Regarding the accumulated incidence, the new document focuses on those over 60 years of age. Those over 80 years of age report an average of 534.68 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, while people between 60 and 69 years of age have an incidence of 407.28 points. By autonomous communities, the regions that report a higher incidence in those over 80 years of age are Canarias and Extremadura, with more than 1,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.



www.eldiario.es