According to CNN, on 13 April, Spain allowed about 300,000 non-essential workers to return to their jobs, mostly in construction and manufacturing industries. Restaurants, bars, and shops continued to be closed.
As here in the US, there was a great deal of discussion about the wisdom of this partial reopening. The General Workers’ Union in Spain expressed concern about the move, and wanted corporations to provide PPE for those returning to work. Catalonia’s president called the move irresponsible on Twitter. The medical journal Lancet published a journal article in its most recent issue, suggesting that lock downs should not be completely lifted until there is a vaccine. This research was based on China’s experience with COVID-19.
This sounded like an opportunity to see what the impact would be on case numbers, so I’ve been keeping an eye this week to see if there’d be a response in daily cases. I’ve put the daily cases graphic as the banner, and the rest of this diary will relate to this graphic.
First, be aware that this is not a “smoothed” plot; often, time series plots are very noisy due to a number of factors, including consistency in day-to-day testing, which I expect explains some of the noise. Also, differences in sampling the population (in this case, people in Spain) will also make the data noisy.
Turning to the graphic, even eyeballing the graphic shows a steep increase starting on 15 April. Given that the time between infections and symptoms (incubation time) is estimated at about 5 days (range 1-14 days), this increase cannot yet be attributable to the partial relaxation of stay at home orders.
Has anything else recently taken place that may have impacted the spread of COVID-19? Spain in the last several days increased testing; daily tests have doubled to around 40,000 according to a governmental advisor. This could explain the increase, in a similar way that hitting the maximum tests available makes the pandemic look like it’s leveled out in this country.
The best answer to the question of “Why”, with respect to the increase in daily cases, is to wait an see. Not much different from here. And stay tuned.