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COVID-19: Lessons from the ‘Spanish lifestyle’ terminator

By Unknown

COVID-19 has hit Spain particularly hard. The first wave of the virus, suffered in late winter and spring 2020, was one of the worst in the European Union (EU), requiring a strict stay-at-home lockdown of over 100 days between 15 March and 21 June. Banning mobility affected the Spanish economy since it is one of the most open countries in the world, receiving, on average, over 80 million visitors every year. Tourism accounts for 12 percent of GDP and 13 percent of employment. This structural factor partly explains the steep decline of 18.5 percent of GDP in the second quarter of 2020, way above the EU GDP, which contracted by “only” 11.7 percent.

The situation remains dire. Annual GDP contraction  for 2020 will be around 12 percent, the deepest since the Civil War in the 1930s. The fiscal deficit will be north of 10 percent, and unemployment will be close to 20 percent. More worrying, the health situation is worsening, with the threat of a second wave at the end of the summer and beginning of autumn looming. At the end of August, with over 3,000 new cases every day, Spain has the highest incidence of COVID-19 in Western Europe. Spain’s numbers are currently three times higher than those of Italy, which had a similar trajectory during the first wave. Spanish experts and researchers are still trying to explain why Spain is such an outlier in Europe and why there is such a difference with Italy, a similar country geographically and culturally.

There are multiple possible factors. Perhaps Spain is testing more than Italy, but it can also be that the Spanish lifestyle,  especially during the summer, is more prone to contagion. Furthermore, quickly opening all businesses in June for the summer season to attract tourists was a national urgency. In hindsight, it might have been a mistake to open bars, clubs and discotheques until late hours. Italy has not allowed that and has maintained its state of emergency to impose targeted lockdowns. It appears that Italy has better tracing capacities than Spain, which still has relatively low ratios of trackers per 1000 people in most of its autonomous regions.

Number of cases and deaths


According to the information reported by individual countries,  Spain, the 30th largest country in the world in terms of population, currently ranks ninth in terms of absolute number of cases, as of 4 September. While it is imperative to view these statistics with consummate care, both because of the scant transparency shown by some countries and because of the objective counting difficulties associated with an illness where a considerable proportion of infected patients are asymptomatic, there can be little doubt that Spain is at the forefront of COVID-19 incidence, at least in Europe, and this is also confirmed by the first studies into seroprevalence  (level of a pathogen in a population measured in blood serum) where, in theory, problems of undercounting are avoided.

The questions and lack of homogeneity regarding official information also arise when one turns to the number of deaths, a statistic that has understandably been viewed as more important for determining the real impact of the disease. According to the official figures at the time of writing,  Spain ranks eighth in the world in terms of the absolute number of deaths (below seven more populous countries — the US, Brazil, Mexico, India, UK, Italy and France). When the ranking is carried out relative to population size, and once micro-countries have been removed, Spain is ranked only behind Belgium and Peru in mortality, with similar numbers to those of the UK.


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