He coronavirus who landed in 2020 in Catalonia has left a bill of about 29,382 deaths in three yearsyes ok lVaccination and the reduction in incidence have been minimizing mortality which, as with other viruses, probably continues to exist, albeit to a lesser extent.
Evolution in Catalonia
He March 6, 2020a woman named Rosalía died at the Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital (Can Ruti) in Badalona (Barcelona) from the coronavirus and became the first fatality of the pandemic in Catalonia.
She was 87 years old, with no link to Italy -then the main European focus of covid- or the Chinese city of Wuhan -where the pandemic originated- and a set of previous pathologies that hardly led to the suspicion that she was infected with covid-19.
From this moment, the Mortality Registry of the Department of Health, which includes notifications from funeral service companies, has recorded Until December 31, 2022, a total of 29,382 deaths related to covid.
Following the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO), these deaths are of people infected with SARS-CoV-2, either because that was the basic cause of death (they died from covid) or a contributing cause of death ( with covid), has indicated the Department of Health.
Those 29,382 deaths represent the 0.38% of the Catalan population and all the inhabitants of Sitges (Barcelona) are equivalent.
Almost half of the deaths were concentrated in 2020, the year in which there was still no vaccine and in which 15,909 deaths were registered, equally between women (7,986) and men (7,923).
The virus struck especially among the elderly, many of them in nursing homes, where more than 4,000 deaths were recorded.
In the first wave there were days with horrifying figures: between March 16 and April 14, 2020 there were more than 300 daily deaths in Catalonia, with a record peak of 417 deaths in a single day on March 30.
Vaccination reduces mortality
The arrival of vaccination in the last bars of 2020 gave hope to the new year, in which the results of scientific research of unprecedented speed saved thousands of lives.
2021 was therefore the year of the mass vaccination campaign of the populationbut since it had to be done progressively, it still registered high numbers of covid, especially during the third wave at the beginning of the year, when it reached a peak of 94 deaths per day on January 5 of that year.
At the end of that year, some 10,000 deaths were recorded, a high figure but substantially lower than that of 2020, while in 2022 the drop was much more pronounced, remaining at about 3,000 deaths.
The covid has already established itself as one more virus among society and, as with the flu, it will probably continue to cause deaths annually, but hardly with the prominence it had in the past.
Last summer, Catalonia registered an excess mortality of 15% (when deaths from any cause are higher than what is expected for a period of time) and, according to a study carried out a posteriori by the Department of Health of the Generalitat , this increase was more attributable to high temperatures than to acute respiratory infections such as covid.
