Spain PM: pandemic increased mortality among non-virus ill

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Spain’s prime minister acknowledged Sunday that the country’s COVID-19 outbreak not only directly killed thousands through fatal infections but also likely increased mortality among those who were suffering from other ailments and failed to get necessary treatment during the crisis.

Spain’s health ministry recognizes over 27,000 confirmed deaths from the new coronavirus.

But the Carlos III Institute that runs the government's mortality observatory has registered more than 43,000 deaths since March above those forecast by models based on mortality in recent years. Also, Spain’s National Institute of Statistics indicates that 48,000 more people have died in Spain in 2020 than during the same period in 2019.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Sunday in a nationally televised address from Madrid that the ministry’s numbers and the higher numbers of overall mortality from the other government institutes’ were “complementary, not contradictory.”

He appeared to say that the discrepancy can be resolved by considering the strong possibility that many chronically-ill people did not either seek or receive their required treatment, or that had the virus but did not die from it directly.

“The data on excess mortality does not estimate how many people have died of a COVID infection. (But) they do permit us to estimate the true impact of the pandemic in lives lost,” Sánchez said. “(They show) the direct mortality and the precipitated mortality that is not due to virus infections, but rather the social and health impact that the pandemic, the confinement, and the structural changes have caused.

“When we have gotten through the pandemic and have the necessary perspective, we will be able with higher quality data to know the truth...