The ómicron variant of Covid is already dominant in the Canary Islands, accounting for 54.8 percent of infections in the week of December 13 to 19, according to the latest 'Update of the epidemiological situation of SARS-CoV-2 variants in Spain', published this Monday by the Ministry of Health.
The report also reveals that ómicron accounted for 20.5 percent of the samples analyzed by the Ministry of Health throughout Spain in that week. Specifically, it accounts for 55.4 in Madrid, 35.21 percent of infections in the Basque Country, 34 percent in Castilla-La Mancha, 28.8 in Extremadura, 28.4 in Navarra, 23 percent in Comunidad Valenciana, 21 percent in Galicia, 20.3 percent in Cantabria and 20 percent in Catalonia.
Andalusia closes the list, with 3.1 percent. In both the Andalusian community and Aragon, Balearic Islands, Cantabria, Castilla y León, Catalonia and Galicia, the Delta variant remains predominant, accounting for more than 75 percent of the sequencing.
"In Spain, it has gone very quickly from detecting the first cases associated with travelers from southern Africa to detecting cases linked to community transmission and to verifying a rapid growth in surveillance systems based on sequencing and specific PCR of random samples," the Ministry points out.
Based on all this context, the experts of the Ministry of Health argue that the expansion of ómicron is being "rapid in many countries around the world." "Community transmission and rapid growth rate in several European countries. In Spain, rapid growth has also been detected in recent weeks," the document summarizes.
In any case, the Ministry of Health points out that "the data are still very scarce to determine the true impact of the ómicron variant on the epidemiological characteristics of the infection, but preliminary studies point to greater transmissibility and greater immune escape." "There is still a high level of uncertainty regarding possible changes in the severity of cases," they add.
