Spain’s prime minister Friday said the real number of coronavirus infections in Spain is “beyond 3 million.”
Although the country has been detecting a record number of daily cases – nearly 21,000 on Thursday alone – Pedro Sanchez said the increase is due to more testing now than during the first wave.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Spain was reporting fewer than 10% of cases, whereas now around seven out of 10 are detected, he said in a televised speech.
A study looking at antibodies against the coronavirus, published in June, found that around 5.2% of Spain’s population – around 2.4 million people – were infected during the first wave. The number of confirmed cases at that time was just around 240,000.