The Government inflates the data from tests carried out to boast that we are in the 'top ten' worldwide

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A month and a half after the state of alarm was decreed, the Government has published for the first time detailed figures on the number of PCR tests - the most reliable in detecting the coronavirus - made in Spain: 1,035,522 tests , until the April 23, according to a statement from the Ministry of Health.

Until now, the Government has limited itself to giving some very generic estimates and two unique data: 355,000 PCRs, as of March 21, and 930,230, as of April 13, both of dubious credibility when compared with those provided by the autonomous communities for those dates and with the own data released today by Health.

The dissemination of the data coincides with the appearance of a graphic shared on social networks by the Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Mexican Ángel Gurría . In his message, Gurría highlighted the presence of Spain among the 10 OECD countries with the most tests for every 1,000 inhabitants, with a rate of 28.6 tests, news of which Pedro Sánchez has echoed, as well as other accounts government officials.

The graph is part of an OECD report, updated today, on the role of Covid-19 diagnostic tests and their importance in the coronavirus containment strategy until the development of a vaccine. Both Sánchez and the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa , have ignored that it is not the first time that the OECD publishes that report. In the version known days ago, Spain did not even appear as a result of the lack of official statistics.

Another detail to take into account is that the data provided by the Office of the President of the Government to the OECD does not distinguish between PCR tests (1,035,522) and the presence of antibodies or rapid tests (310,038). If the latter are excluded, as the original study used by the OECD does to extract the figures from the rest of the countries, the national rate would be 22 tests per 1,000 inhabitants, below the average for the OECD countries. With those numbers, Spain would fall 10 places in the classification to which Sánchez and Illa have mentioned, from 8th to 18th place, between the Czech Republic and Portugal.

By absolute figures, Madrid (203,892 tests), Catalonia (194,039), the Valencian Community 96,406), Galicia (81,201), the Basque Country (72,044) and Castilla y León (65,689) are the communities that have carried out the most PCR reactions. The performance of Andalusia is surprising , with a number of analyzes similar to that of the Castilian-Leonese, despite having more than triple the population.

A more realistic measure of the diagnostic capacity of PCR is the rate of each territory based on the number of inhabitants. La Rioja stands out (56.91 / 1,000 inhabitants), followed by Asturias (33.75), Cantabria (33.61), the Basque Country (33.02) and Madrid (30.50), according to data from the note from Press sent by the Ministry of Health.

All this information, from April 23, comes a day after EL MUNDO published how Sanidad sent false data to the Financial Times to later refer to them and highlight that Spain was the second country with the most tests carried out until March.

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