In the last 24 hours, 849 coronavirus patients have died in Spain, which is the biggest daily rise in the country.
Spain’s health ministry says the death toll in the past 24 hours was 849, which is a new record for the country. The previous highest daily figure was 838 on Sunday.
The total of people infected has surpassed China, where the outbreak started, it is now 94,417. There are plans to move some intensive care patients from Madrid and Catalonia, the worst-hit areas, to other parts of Spain.
That takes the total number of fatalities there from 7,340 to 8,189, although the percentage rise is slightly down on Monday.
The number of confirmed cases in Spain stands at 94,417; up 9,222 from 85,195.
The new deaths in Spain take the worldwide total of fatalities past 38,000, and the new cases nudge that global figure close to 800,000.
Spanish authorities have reportedly started to build new morgues across the country as a result of the rising number of fatalities.
Health emergency chief Fernando Simon said the epidemic seemed to be nearing its peak in some areas, but stressed that Spain has a shortage of intensive care beds.
He went on to say:
“We continue to have a major problem with ICU saturation.”
Spain’s foreign minister, Arancha Gonzalez, proposed increasing the budget of the European Union to tackle the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Perhaps we should improve European cashflow, perhaps the European budget should be larger,” she said
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez, has extended Spain’s state of emergency, requiring all non-essential workers to remain at home for a further two weeks.
Mr Sanchez said: “This decision allows us to reduce the number of infected people to a much greater extent.”
Another Spanish politician has admitted that officials had “acted late”. Rafael Bengoa, a former adviser to the World Health Organisation and a health minister in the Basque regional government said that:
“It is called denial of normalcy – refusing to believe that something is happening. It is the same now as happened in London 150 years ago,”
“We all acted late – in Spain, Italy, and China when the virus first hit.”
