Spanish President, Pedro Sánchez, today announced that he has called all the regional leaders to a video conference next Wednesday, December 22nd, in order to discuss the Covid situation, and to coordinate regional responses to the current sharp increase in cases, especially of the Omicron variant of the disease.
"The virus is not going away,” he reminded us, “and the fight to control its spread needs to remain a priority for every regional government".
The conference, which will take place just two days before Christmas Eve, has been called "to review the pandemic situation and to evaluate new measures that could be implemented over the coming weeks", Sánchez said.
Throughout his speech today, the President talked about “universal measures” and made no mention of any immediate new restrictions, even though the current situation, with the recent spike in the number of cases being reported “suggests a real and present risk”
In view of the recent rapid rise in infection rates, Sánchez urged regional governments to "strengthen" their current measures, but in a coordinated fashion, hence the decision to call Wednesday’s conference.
In his speech, Sánchez warned that even though incidence rates were “lower in Spain than in many of the neighbouring countries, they could not be considered good". According to the latest Health Authorities report, Spain is in the “high risk” category as the cumulative incidence has shot up to 511 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in 14 days.
Sánchez also underlined the fact that this latest wave of the pandemic was displaying "different characteristics" and was affecting people "in a different fashion", with much higher infection rates than the same time last year, but much lower rates of hospitalisation, and far fewer people in the ICUs.
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