Spain officially records 100,000 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic

When on 3 March 2020, the Valencian region notified the first death in Spain from Covid-19 - a 69-year-old man who had just returned from Nepal - there was nothing to suggest that the new coronavirus that had been detected three months earlier in the Chinese province of Wuhan would leave such a deadly trail in Spain.

But two years and six waves later, Spain has officially passed the 100,000 deaths from Covid milestone this Wednesday (2 March), according to official statistics from the Ministry of Health - which still do not reflect all deaths - after another 154 were added in the last 24 hours making a total of 100,037.

The magnitude of this number is best understood by comparing it with the population of some Spanish cities: as many people have died in the pandemic as there are inhabitants in Gerona, Santiago de Compostela, Lugo or Lorca. In the contemporary age, only three national tragedies have reached such figures: the Civil War (the consensus of historians speak of 540,000 deaths); another pandemic, that of 1918, which in three years wiped out 186,184 Spaniards, according to the records of the time; and the Francoist repression, which claimed approximately 150,000 lives.

Although Covid has also killed young people, the pandemic has particularly hit the elderly. According to the records of the Carlos III Institute (with data up to 23 February) some 84% of those killed by Covid, 83,214, were over 70 years old. The group with the most deaths has been that of people between 80 and 89 years old, with 39,146 deaths. In contrast, only 192 under the age of 30 have died.

Nursing homes have been seen 33,000 deaths registered. Officially, according to Imserso reports, 22,589 residents have died in these residences with Covid-19 as the confirmed cause of death and another 10,546 have died with symptoms compatible with the disease. This huge difference between the number of officially recorded deaths and deaths 'compatible' with Covid has been one of the most repeated arguments to question the figures reported by the Ministry of Health during the health emergency. The lack of diagnostic tests, especially in the first months of the health crisis, meant that many deaths that were almost certainly due to the coronavirus have not been included in the daily reports provided by Ministry of Health. Even so, other investigations, even from public authorities, such as the National Institute of Statistics, have found 20,000 more deaths from Covid than those reported by the department headed by Carolina Darias.

Like a roller coaster, deaths from the coronavirus in these two years of pandemic show peaks and falls. They are the waves, six so far, that have had a different impact on mortality. Although some data has been updated, accounting shows that the most dramatic have been the first wave, with 26,737 deaths recorded between 3 March and 11 May 2020, and the third, with 22,854 between 2 December 2020 and 24 February 2021. The second onslaught of the virus left 19,047 deaths between 11 May and 2 December 2020; the fourth (between 24 February and 26 June 2021) ended with 12,311 deaths and the fifth (26 June - 14 October 2021) ended with 6,138 deaths. The sixth, which Spain is still in, stands at 10,765.

Linked to the waves, and above all, to vaccination, another variable appears.

The global lethality of the pandemic stands at 0.9%, that is, almost one person in every hundred infected by Covid has died. However, in the sixth wave, this figure has dropped to 0.2% thanks to vaccination, as the formulas have protected against severe disease and hospitalisations. According to data from the Ministry, a person between 60 and 79 years of age is 27 times more likely to die if they have not been vaccinated and 14 times more among those over 80 years of age.

By autonomous regions, Catalonia and Madrid, with 18,000 each, are the ones that have registered the most deaths. They are followed by Andalucía (12,741), Castilla y León (8,204), Castilla-La Mancha (7,064) and the Basque Country (6,142). The ones that have reported the fewest deaths are Navarra (1,491), the Balearic Islands (1,209), La Rioja (906) and Cantabria (758).