Journalists, researchers and Covid nerds will be pleased to learn that the Canarian Health Service has launched a new daily report giving more information about the Covid-19 situation on all seven Canary Islands.
The report will be updated on every working day and uses a five-colour scheme to mark the risk levels on various islands and their municipalities, starting with pale green for “minimal risk” and rising to purple for “Very high risk”. The tables list the 7- and 14- day infection rates and positive test percentages for the Canaries as a whole, each island, and each municipality; and new elements include the infection rates for over-65 year-olds and a “traceability” figure showing the percentage of cases which have been successfully connected to identified outbreaks.
A glance at the current report confirms the concerning situation in Tenerife, whose table is full of red and purple cells, but also provides interesting new information, such as that over-65s in Tías, Lanzarote, are classed as a high risk group; or that traceability appears to be satisfactory nearly everywhere on the islands.
The table also shows how infection rates measured in terms of a population of 100,000 people mean very little in small populations. The municipality of Puntallana on La Palma, for example, has an alarming infection rate of 166 cases for every 100,000 over-65-year olds. However, Puntallana only has 2,500 inhabitants and even fewer pensioners, and only one of them has Covid-19.
The new report can be accessed at the Canarian Government’s Covid-19 portal.
By clicking Informes Epidemiogicos. This portal also leads to the immensely useful Grafcan site, by clicking on Datos de Covid-19 en Canarias. It’s an interactive site in Spanish which takes a little getting used to, but is by far the best resource for researching the development of the pandemic on the Canaries.
For English language speakers, the excellent cvcanarias.com project still offers reliable, daily updates giving required information on the islands. It’s not official, and calculates its own infection rates figures, but the figures are reliably based on official sources.
Other vital official sources are the Spanish Health Ministry’s situacion and actualizacion (update) which is issued every working day and provides official Spanish figures for the country and all the regions.
