"We have always boasted that traceability in Lanzarote was very high and now it has dropped a bit, but it is because we have few positives and many come from outside." That is what the manager of Health Services of Lanzarote, José Luis Aparicio, defended on Radio Lanzarote to explain why the Ministry of Health has placed the fulfillment of this parameter on the island in red, with a rating of "high risk".
"It is not that we are not tracing well, it is traced as well as always," he insisted, attributing that drop to imported cases, which do not allow for follow-up.
Traceability marks the percentage of detected cases that have been associated with a specific outbreak (which implies three or more related cases), and not achieving it means that the origin of that contagion is unknown. However, Aparicio affirms that in the case of the island this data "is not significant", because he assures that the majority of the latest cases detected have come from outside, which means that they already entered Lanzarote with the virus and that therefore that traceability cannot be established.
For that reason, he has downplayed the fact that Lanzarote has gone to be far below the rest of the archipelago in this indicator, with 43.48%, compared to an average of 63.71% in the Canary Islands.
In the case of the eight new positive cases reported this Tuesday, four were students who had just returned to the island, and the Health manager affirms that there have also been cases of foreigners. Regarding international tourists, the regulations have required for weeks that they arrive on the island with a negative test, although some would not be complying and the positive is detected as a result of the controls established upon arrival in Lanzarote. In this regard, the Ministry of Health of the Canary Islands has not provided figures on how many cases of this type are occurring, or even if any could have entered through the airport and been detected later.
As for the students who live in the Peninsula and who return to the island for Christmas, the Canary Islands also published a decree that implies that they must undergo a test before flying or have it done as soon as they arrive on the island.
In this case, José Luis Aparicio has detailed that more than 1,500 young people requested an appointment for these tests, which began to be applied in Lanzarote before the rest of the Canary Islands, giving some of them positive. Later, the Canarian Government published a decree last week ordering these tests to be carried out to enter all the islands of the archipelago, offering a network of laboratories in Spain so that residents who return during the Christmas period can have them done free of charge before coming.
“It is much better because they no longer travel without having the test,” Aparicio pointed out in this regard, detailing that in previous weeks they were even waiting for the landing time of each young person to test them as soon as they arrived. Regarding these tests in Lanzarote, he specified that they are PCR, “because they are much better for this”, although the Canarian regulations also allow antigen tests, which are less reliable for asymptomatic cases.
In the case of foreigners, whose entry into Spain is regulated by the central government, the test required is the PCR, and the decree of the Canarian Government to try to also validate antigen tests has ended up being suspended by the Constitutional Court.
