Why Madrid only registers a new infected | Madrid

A new positive case. That is the figure registered by the Ministry of Health in Madrid this Monday. “It is true that this current data is surprising and the team is talking to the community to see its reality,” explained Fernando Simón, director of the Center for Control of Alerts and Health Emergencies during the daily appearance of the covid-19 crisis. The weekend always generates delays and alterations in the notifications, to which we must also add the holiday of last Friday, May 1. Even taking into account those circumstances, Simón has clarified that the veracity of that data will be seen “in the coming days.”

The Ministry of Health of Madrid assures that “a new one in the day is correct”. “But there are always data to dump from previous days. We are dumping from previous days so that the total is not outdated”, adds a spokesman. “Dumped” to which the regional government refers are the numbers that they publish on the official website dedicated to the region’s coronavirus Since last April 22, they issue a daily report with various figures, including new positives, which have never they match the ones they send to the ministry. Nor have they ever explained why.

For several days, in addition, the Community of Madrid began to make accounting changes that led to the correction of the series of historical data in the region and which will also entail a correction in the national statistics that, Simon has already warned, will be made when it is verified that Madrid’s modifications have been made correctly. This is aimed “that new diagnoses are placed where they should be placed,” the director of the CCAES specified Monday.

The normal procedure for autonomies is to collect the sample, do the test and notify the positive; something that takes between one and two days, so the cases that are observed daily are, in fact, the photo of, more or less, 48 ​​hours before. Madrid stopped doing so. Now, when it has the positive, it includes it on the day the sample was taken, so the daily data for Madrid are never really a reflection of the present, nor are the rest of the territories, because the results are always about days before.

While the rest of the regions have kept the way of reporting stable, which also gives stability when it comes to analyzing the data, Madrid has not, so now, to see the reality of the evolution of the pandemic in the region, it is necessary to go back days continuously to see when each positive got. Only the accumulated total – which this Monday is 62,395 – allows us to see how much the positives grow, but not their daily evolution.

Madrid registers this Monday 62,395 coronavirus cases, 40,741 patients have required hospitalization and 3,431 of them have done so in an ICU

Another, more reliable data to see this progression of the pandemic is the number of hospitalizations, that is, the new cases that are admitted daily by covid-19; This Monday, for example, there are 144, and there have already been 40,741 patients who have needed a hospital bed, of them 37,808 have already been discharged, 104 in the last 24 hours. In ICU, there are still 660 critically ill patients, and the accumulated number reaches 3,431. That figure, the total number of serious injuries, was another one that forced the Ministry to change the national registry, since it was not until just two weeks ago that Madrid began to provide it.

Also just two weeks ago, when the region began its own report, the difference between the number of deaths sent by the Health statistics and that registered by the Community was visible. While the Ministry sends the dead in hospitals (44 in the last 24 hours, 8,376 since the crisis began), on their page they also add those of social health centers, homes and other places. That figure reaches 13,409 and only changes on Tuesdays and Fridays, the two days that you have to send them as regulated by a government order to make the information collection of the autonomies homogeneous.

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