The new cases of Covid-19 does not stop increasing day after day. The growth curve is exponential: it increased from 0 to 100 in the first week, from 100 to 1,000 in the second week, to more than 10,000 in the third week and to 100,000 in the fourth.

Control of the epidemic will be achieved when the curve remains stable and new cases and deaths cease to be recorded every day. In this graph that is automatically updated with data from the Ministry of Health , the evolution of the pandemic can be seen in the number of active, recovered and deceased cases in Spain . The number of assets excludes those who have already been cured of the disease and those who have died from it.

However, the number of infected people does not rise equally in all the autonomous communities. The Community of Madrid is for now the one with the highest number of infected, followed by Catalonia.

The large number of those infected in Madrid is also due to the fact that it is the community where the outbreak first hatched – taking as a reference the first day that 30 or more infected were counted – and, therefore, technically it is the one that has been facing the longest number of days the epidemic.

This is illustrated more clearly in the following graph where the evolution of the curve of each Autonomous Community is shown since they registered more than 30 infected.

With this homogenized variable, Madrid had also until now been the community that had accumulated the most cases over time, however this Wednesday, March 25, Catalonia has passed ahead in the number of affected: the fifteenth day of the outbreak, Madrid had just over 7,000 affected and Catalonia exceeds 9,000.

It is a graph drawn on a logarithmic scale and shows the distance from 1 to 10 as well as from 10 to 100. Above all, it serves to measure the evolution of a variable in terms of duplication, so that the more sloping, the faster it is the spread of the virus and vice versa.

The 110,238 patients diagnosed until this Saturday are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, there are many other cases that have contracted the virus and have symptoms of Covid-19, but they have not been tested and therefore do not appear in any registry: no one knows exactly how many carriers there are at the moment in Spain.

The death toll is another variable that allows measuring the impact of the virus on society, since it also serves as an approximation to the actual number of those affected.

The case fatality rate of coronavirus varies in each country and this does not depend solely on the aging of the population but also on the strategy that has been followed in the detection of patients in the asymptomatic phase. This would mean that a higher rate of deaths, could indicate that there are many more carriers of the undetected Covid-19 virus.

In some Autonomous Communities, the mortality rate ranges between 1 and 4%, a figure that fits the data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), which would place the lethality of the virus between 3 and 4% . However, in many autonomous communities the mortality rate far exceeds the virus mortality indicated by the WHO.

Neither in Hubei, the province of China where the outbreak began, nor even in Lombardy, the most affected region in Italy, has the rate of deaths increased to the rate it is doing in Madrid or Catalonia. If we compare the advance of lethality by region, the two economic engines of Spain are, together with the state of New York, the centers where the deceased have shot up the fastest since the start of the outbreak.

According to the latest figures provided by the Ministry of Health, Madrid has exceeded in 21 days the number of deaths in Hubei in the more than three months they have been facing the Covid-19 health crisis.

Madrid leads the ranking with a rate with a rate of 12.9%, followed by Castilla – La Mancha with 11.1. For its part, Extremadura, Catalonia and Castilla y León have a figure of between 8 and 10%. Which would mean that in these six communities is where more cases go undetected.

The Ministry of Health of Madrid, the community has been facing the Coronavirus crisis for the longest, has set the inflection curve inflection around April 15, at which time the administration expects active cases to begin to decrease. According to these data, this next weekend the peak of infection should be reached.