The Ministry of Justice today urged the almost 4,000 civil registries in Spain to urgently send all the information on burial licenses processed since March 14 in the 50 Spanish provinces.

The Government wants to clarify as soon as possible the official figures on those killed by coronavirus after EL MUNDO has reported that the autonomous communities calculate that the actual number of deaths from Covid-19 doubles the official number. As this newspaper has also advanced today, mortality has soared in Spain since mid-March by 47%, according to official data. In some regions, such as Castilla-La Mancha , the death toll has shot up almost 200%, according to the Daily Mortality Monitoring System in Spain.

Justice today demanded from the records daily data on the number of deaths, the locality where they occurred, the place of death (hospital, home, residence ...) and if the death was due to confirmed coronavirus or with symptoms of this disease, if they appear, as almost all the Autonomous Communities record.

The Executive wants to approximate the real number of deaths from COVID-19 in Spain, which according to Health is currently 13,798 people .

Last Saturday, the Ministry of Justice already sent an instruction for the registries to send their data every day. This week, the Government claims the most accurate and detailed data possible, as Cadena Ser has advanced.

All this is done in view of the difficulty of knowing the real data on deaths from coronavirus. Minister Salvador Illa admitted on Tuesday that only deaths confirmed with a diagnostic test for coronavirus are counted, that is, those killed in the hospital because right now only tests are carried out on hospitalized patients, seriously ill patients. The official data does not include the elderly who have died in nursing homes because, until now, they have not been tested.

In Saturday's instruction, Justice explained that the objective of improving and detailing the information is to achieve "the highest degree of accuracy possible and with the immediacy that reality demands."

The instructions that the Ministry of Health gave to all the autonomous communities, as this newspaper announced on Tuesday, order to count as fatalities of Covid-19 only the confirmed cases with a diagnostic test of being sick with coronavirus, not the suspected cases or those with symptoms compatible with this disease.

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  • Spain
  • Castilla la Mancha

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