Day 46 – Thursday 30th April
I had a bit of a fright today. Whilst waiting for the Health Minister to make his announcement regards the rules around allowing us out to exercise from Saturday I thought I’d have a quick look at the daily stats for Covid-19 cases and check the number of new cases was continuing to decline. Imagine my horror when at first glance it seems they’ve gone up in Madrid. OMG! If this continues they will have no choice but to stop deescalation plans in Madrid. Noooo!
I did wonder if this increase had anything to do with them allowing certain industries, like the construction sector, to return to work a few weeks ago. After all the new cases are basically only people who end up in hospital, because otherwise you’re unlikely to get tested in Spain, and there is usually a lag of 2-3 weeks between contracting Covid-19 and needing hospital treatment.
Before I started berating these workers I thought I’d better check my figures. I recall I was quite surprised at the decrease in new cases when I totted up the totals for the week on Monday. Weekly new cases had decreased from 9817 the previous week to 2458. That is a significant drop. On closer inspection it turns out the government had changed the way they publish new cases half way through last week. They previously reported all cases where a person had either received the PCR test or an antibody test. On Friday they stopped reporting people who had received the antibody test and 3393 cases disappeared from the Madrid total overnight. So last weeks total of new cases was in fact 5851.
Mind you it wasn’t all the fault of the change in reporting. Each day they publish two spreadsheets: one detailing new cases and the second detailing hospitalisations, deaths and the cured. For one of the days I’d read the wrong chart and was looking at the total number of people still in hospital in Madrid. You can see why I normally only look at this stuff once a week. Talk about stress, I could see my opportunity for daily exercise going up in smoke. Fortunately this is not the case and new cases in Madrid continue to go down steadily week on week.
At 6pm the Minister of Health finally gave the rules around daily exercise outside live on television. He speaks Spanish very clearly so I was able to understand him well. I’m quite chuffed with that. I will still await the N332 translation of what her said, just to be sure, but here is what I think the rules are.
From Saturday individuals 14 years of age and over are allowed out for one hour of exercise within their own municipality. I didn’t catch whether there was a limit on distance like the 1km from your house for children. One of the journalists did ask this question but I had mentally switched off by then. We can do any exercise as long as it is individual. You may not exercise with others, though I’m not sure if this includes members of the same household. We are limited to the hours of 6am to 10am and 8pm to 11pm. Families with children are now limited to the hours of 12pm to 7pm. The elderly and those considered vulnerable to this disease can also go out for one hour between the hours of 10am to 12pm. This way we are not all on the street at once.
I can work with that. Happy now 🙂