Situation in Spain 🇪🇸 with COVID-19

Coronavirus History in Spain 🇪🇸

The COVID-19 pandemic in Spain is part of the pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‑19). Spain has the second-highest total confirmed cases in Europe after Russia. The first confirmed cases came from Germany and spread to Spain on 31 Jan 2019. Up to 15 Mar 2020, all 50 provinces have confirmed cases of the country. Spain became one of the most draconian countries in the world and a lockdown restriction imposed on 14 March 2020. Until 13 Sep 2020, there are about 566,326 confirmed cases and 29,747 deaths WHO(Organization 2020).

Data Source and Descriptions 🚨

The data is taken from the tidycovid19(Gassen 2020a) package 📦 created by Joachim Gassen. The tidycovid19 package was created to provide transparent access to various data sources. Then, used download_merged_data to merge the dataset. This merged dataset contains data of coronavirus confirmed, recovered, death original collected from Johns Hopkins University(University 2020). Some other variables contain the frequency places are visited from Google Community Mobility Reports(Google 2020). The second set of data comes from Bing(Bing 2020), which contains all the regions location and cases in Spain. The raw data was stored in two CSV files separately. The data collection date for this blog until 13 Sep 2020. The following map and plots present these variables in the data set and also contain descriptions.

Is data reflect the real situation? What caused the Coronavirus crisis in Spain? 🗺

Coronavirus crisis is one of the darkest and dramatic moments in recent Spanish history which the virus is spreading faster than any neighboring nation. From Figure 1 below, Madrid, the Spanish region with the highest number of cases, had the confirmed cases of 81,047 in total. After that, Catalonia became the second highest number of cases up to 62,524 until 13 Sep 2020.

However, this set of number does not show the full picture of Spain’s coronavirus crisis. Figure 2 does not present daily new cases for all regions; otherwise the plot will be extremely complex and hard to read. Cases for most days is zero or not available. Therefore, how the coronavirus outbreak is developing through the data is not accurate. ELPAIS(ELTAIS 2020) explain the potential reason for this situation. To be specific, the hospital 🏥 may spend more than one week to process person contracting the disease, some symptoms present and ask for a test and getting the results. In this one-week period, this person did not get isolation and may have local transmission of the coronavirus began to increase. That’s why experts believe that the number of confirmed cases may be 10 times higher than what they have been reported.

What’s more, what caused the coronavirus in Spain to be a crisis? Guardian(Guardian 2020) gives two fundamental reasons.

• Mundane: The main reason for the quick spread through Spain may be mundane. Hugging, kissing and animated chatter from other’s face in a few inches have become a commonplace thing.
• Government: Another reason was the government reacted late ,and clumsily.

Since the financial crisis, Spain has been extremely fragile and this country lacks essential equipment. During the crisis, protective clothing for doctors and coronavirus tests were still only just being sourced ,and China provided assistance within its capability to help Spain Xinhua(Xinhua 2020).

Due to continued coronavirus deterioration, the lockdown that began on 14 Mar 2020 enforced with police and popular pressure Guardian(Guardian 2020). The next following section will explore lockdown restriction on citizen daily activity frequency changes.

How lockdown restriction impact citizen daily activity? 👣

Countries around the world are in uncharted territory. The emergence and spread of COVID-19 have touched every facet of society. The Spain nationwide lockdown began at 14 Mar 2020, as a result, daily life comes to a halt, such as public gathering party are cancelled, employees were sent back to home. All sizes of business are facing many uncertainties about their prospects.

The following Figure 3 and Figure 4 presents the changes in different activities regarding the lockdown restrictions🔒. Up to now, stage four restrictions happened twice since the beginning of lockdown at March 14. Stage four was an advanced phase, in which the restriction was limited. More than 23,000 people have died in Spain after contracting coronavirus, making the country one of the worst affected in the world by the illness. At this period, thousands of employee were forced to work at home during nearly three-month coronavirus lockdown. Therefore, people visited workplaces has dropped about 50% compared with before. After the fourth stage lockdown restriction ended, employees allowed to work in the physical workplace and frequency that people visit workplaces increased, but still lower than the average rate. Remote working caused by coronavirus has made many people aware of the convenience. Besides, Spain government are protecting the rights of remote workers. Such as distance working must be a voluntary choice ,or employees have the right to apply compensation for any direct or indirect costs related to remote work ELPAIS(ELPAIS 2020).

Figure 3: The frequency that people visit workplaces and residential relative to the baseline period Jan 3 - Feb 6, 2020.

Within the lockdown period, parks closed. Most of them transfer the outdoor sports to exercise at home. In Figure 4, people rarely visit parks during the lockdown period. At the end of April, it has seen a steadily declining number of cases per day, leading to the country’s plan to broaden lockdown restrictions. Spain has released an exit strategy from the lockdown restriction in a bid to return the normality, while keeping COVID-19 under control euronews(euronews 2020). With the gradual relaxation of the lockdown restriction, retail and recreation industry allowed to reopen to the public, such as sidewalk café reopened and Spaniards can exercise outdoors CNN(Goodman 2020). As a consequence, the frequency that people visit parks increase over than 50%, which is higher than any other activities.

Figure 4: The frequency changes that people visit pharmacy, parks, retail and recreation relative to the baseline period Jan 3 - Feb 6, 2020

Overall, as the pandemic is under control, people’s travel frequency has increased, especially for outdoor activities. For now, Spain has decreased to the first level of lockdown, daily life gradually returns to normal. However, face masks are now obligatory at ALL times and keep two meters social distance. Some regions such as Aragon Madrid and Cataluña are currently experiencing outbreaks that have brought back lockdown in some towns and areas. The government is also making regulations based on the current situation.

Acknowledgements

The packages used for producing this post are:

tidyverse (Wickham et al. 2019), knitr (Xie 2014), kableExtra (Zhu 2019), dplyr (Wickham et al. 2020), tidycovid19(Gassen 2020b), zoo(Zeileis and Grothendieck 2005), ggplot(Wickham 2016),scales(Wickham and Seidel 2020), highcharter(Kunst 2020), leaflet(Cheng, Karambelkar, and Xie 2019), lubridate(Grolemund and Wickham 2011).

The raw data comes from two github repositories: tidycovid19(Gassen 2020a) and Bing(Bing 2020).