The Areafit gym has released a new letter addressed to its users in which it no longer denies being the origin of the largest Covid outbreak recorded so far on the island, but it does continue to reduce the data released by the Ministry of Health to less than a quarter. On its Facebook page, the company even speaks of a "media circus" due to the information that has been published, and insists on attributing the cases detected in this center to "statistics", having carried out a screening among more than 1,300 workers and users.
"We regret that this difficult decision has even led to greater stigmatization simply for trying to act consistently", they point out in reference to that screening carried out by the Health area, as well as the temporary closure that the gym ended up agreeing to two days after the start of those mass tests.
Regarding the figures for infections, they insist that initially there were only "six asymptomatic positives", and add that with the screening, another 16 were detected among workers or users of the center, and 14 more from family and social ramifications. "Obviously, by agreeing to test so many people, we knew and were warned that we would find cases, since due to the very statistics of the virus, it was going to appear," says the company, which has even disseminated a report from the Health area to argue that only 30 cases were detected in the screening.
However, the official data from the Ministry of Health raises the figure to 156 confirmed cases as of this Monday linked to this outbreak, 69 of them "directly related to sports activity." And it is that, apart from that screening, another 126 positives have already been confirmed.
In fact, when the screening began there were already about 60 confirmed cases (compared to the 6 recognized by the company), and 33 of them were users and workers of the gym. Afterwards, the screening effectively yielded 30 more positives, but in parallel others have been known through ordinary protocols. Some are the result of tracking the close contacts of people who tested positive, but others are from users who were not included in the screening, because they were already being monitored, for having participated in classes in which infections occurred. Specifically, there were 20 people who had tested negative in the first PCR and were in isolation, and tested positive when it was repeated a few days later, since the virus can take up to almost a week to be detected.
"We are the only ones who can verify objective and contrasted data"
"At this moment we are the only ones who can verify with objective data, confirmed and contrasted with the only reliable source of information, such as the Health Service itself that carried out all the screening, that our center only had 16 asymptomatic positive people, which does not mean that they were infected there", they insist, however, from the gym, focusing only on the results of that screening and ignoring the rest of the cases.
"From the beginning, this center is doing everything in its power to avoid aggravating the situation of the so-called sports outbreak to the point of deciding to close preventively once the first six asymptomatic cases were confirmed," they say from the gym, which in reality closed on May 14, two days after the screening began and 18 days after the first positives were detected, which were confirmed on April 27.
In addition, the center questions the information that is being disseminated - despite the fact that it comes from the Ministry of Health itself and the Canary Islands Health Service - and states that if it has decided to send this new letter to its users it is so that they know "the reality of the events". In the previous letter they sent on May 14, in which they announced the temporary closure, they directly denied the facts. "No outbreak related to Covid19 has originated in our center," they said then, when there were already 83 confirmed cases.
"They have not necessarily been infected in our center"
Now, they neither confirm nor deny being the origin of the outbreak. "They have not necessarily been infected in our center," they point out in their writing, in reference to the 22 workers and users who do recognize that they have tested positive (compared to the 69 that the Ministry of Health has confirmed).
"We would never have had this data without testing each user of the center who attended on dates of risk, inviting reflection on what would happen if we randomly test so many people on the street," they add.
"We do not intend to exempt our possible part of responsibility and much less do we want or understand it ethical to point out other facilities in the area that surely had their measures and will have the same concern in the face of this situation. However, we would like that part of responsibility to be in its fair measure and/or at least that our users know the reality of the data referring to us," they conclude in their letter.
"Now it sounds crazy to say that the sports field has been safe enough all this time to prevent the entry of the virus, but the truth is that with the designed protocols and the collaboration and common sense of all, a safe space can be achieved where precisely to face the virus thanks to improving our fitness," they add, saying goodbye to their clients with the announcement that they will "soon" reopen their doors.
