Summer Spain faces the third heat wave of 2022 with suffocating days and nights
Health Heat wave: "The deaths could have been avoided; we warned days ago"
Health This is the profile of the victims of the heat wave: "There are middle-aged patients who arrive with a body temperature of more than 40ºC"
The
Carlos III Health Institute
estimates that, between July 1 and 29, there have been 9,687 more deaths than expected for that period, of which
2,124 are attributable to high temperatures
, with a peak in the middle of the month that it coincided with the second
heat wave of the summer
.
These are the latest calculations from
the Daily Mortality Monitoring System
(MoMo), which since June 1 has detected 13,908 more deaths than expected,
3,305 of them due to excessive heat
.
By age groups, the highest figure is found in those over 75 years of age, especially over
85.
In no case are these real death figures, but rather
an estimate
made by the MoMo based on a mathematical model that uses three data sources:
civil registries
, which do not specify the codified cause of death;
the temperatures according to the
State Meteorological Agency
at the provincial level in the same period of time;
and the
population by age group
, sex and province, extracted from the INE.
From there, it makes a
statistical estimate
of excess mortality for a given day by comparing historical series, but
it does not offer real figures for deaths
, an estimate that, moreover, cannot be considered consolidated until
at least one month has passed since its publication
, although they give an idea of the evolution of excess mortality in the Spanish population.
With these premises,
most of the estimated excess deaths
have been calculated for the July period, in which the excess mortality detected amounts to 9,687 deaths, of which
2,124 are directly attributable to the heat
-heat stroke- or, in a much greater proportion, indirect -due to the aggravation of previous pathologies-,
compared to the 554 that he calculated for last year.
This is
the highest estimate
he has made since this system was launched with the exception of the historic
summer of 2003
: that year he estimated an excess of 12,804 deaths in the entire summer.
According to the MoMo,
the highest peaks in excess mortality
this month of July have occurred between the 16th, for which it has estimated 150 deaths, and the 21st of July (147).
On average,
the highest figures
are recorded on days 18 and 19, with 183 and 184 deaths, respectively.
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