Identifying thresholds of change during the first wave of COVID-19 in Spain

One of the largest nationwide bursts of the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Spain, where infection expanded in densely populated areas through March 2020. 

In the article Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain, recently published in Epidemilogy & Infection, we analyzed the cumulative growth curves of reported cases and deaths in Spain, Madrid and Catalonia, and associate identify changes in their growth curve with key events, containment measures,  policy stringency and citizen mobility. 

Results showed four major reductions in growth rates originating from infections before March 3 and on March 5–8, 10–12 and 14–18, but no identifiable effect of the strengthened lockdown of 29–30 March. Changes in stringency and mobility were only associated to the latter two shifts.

These patterns of change show that a combination of public awareness, personal hygiene and social distancing can help slow down COVID-19 spread in future outbreaks – such as the one already ongoing in Spain or Israel in September 2020. They also emphasize that policy implementation should be accompanied by a more effective communication strategy that helps engaging the general public into following measures whose effectiveness can be misperceived due to the long infection-to-detection lags of SARS-CoV-2 infections. 

This virtuous combination of active public health and information policies, and the reinforcement of primary health care would help avoiding the harsh economic and social consequences of having to recourse to hard lockdowns in current and future outbursts of COVID-19 and other pandemics.

You can access the Suppementary Information, not provided yet in the Advanced Onlipe Publication, here.

COVID-19 effective reproduction number during Spain's confinement

COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spread worldwide, and Spain has suffered one of the largest nationwide bursts, particularly in the highly populated areas of Madrid and Barcelona - two of the five largest conurbations in Europe. 

In the article COVID-19 effective reproduction number dropped during Spain's nationwide dropdown, then spiked at lower-incidence regions (for which the journal offers now a 50 days' free access), Luis Santamaría and Joaquín Hortal used segmented regression analyses to identify shifts in the evolution of the effective reproduction number (Rt) reported for 16 Spanish administrative regions - qand associated the observed breaking points with a timeline of key containment measures taken by national and regional governments, applying time lags for the time from contagion to case detection.

Results show an early decrease of Rt that preceded the nationwide lockdown; a generalized, sharp decrease in Rt associated with such lockdown; a low impact of the strengthened lockdown, with a flattening of Rt evolution in high-incidence regions, and even increases in Rt at low-incidence regions; and an increase in Rt associated to the relaxation of the lockdown measures in ten regions. 

These results evidence the importance of generalized lockdown measures to contain COVID-19 spread, and the limited effect of the subsequent application of a stricter lockdown (restrictions to all non-essential economic activities). Most importantly, they highlight the importance of maintaining strong social distancing measures and strengthening public health control during lockdown de-escalation. 

Failing to fulfill these requirements has thrown Spain into a new cycle of  widespread, uncontrolled infections - particularly at Madrid. This article aimed therefore to be one of the numerous contributions to lay down a  robust sicentific base for mor efficient policies to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Temporal evolution of Covid19 cases in Spain - Evolución de los casos de Covid19 en España

Temporal evolution of Covid19 cases in Spain

A few days ago, two of us (LS and SP) published, together with four colleagues, the newspaper article Containment measures against Covid19 have saved already many lifes in Spain, but additional efforts are needed [in Spanish] in the blog Ciencia Crítica of eldiario.es. There, we used exponential and logistic fits to explain, in an accesible language, the evolution of the number of cases and fatalities caused by Covid19 in Spain.

In this page, you can find a regular updating of the data and graphs, and we include accesible,non-technical explanations about their calculation and how they have changed over time. [Note that this is the only section of this web that is fully in Spanish]

Evolución de los casos de Covid19 en España

Hace unos días, dos de nosotros (LS y SP) publicamos, junto a cuatro investigadores más, un artículo titulado Las medidas frente al coronavirus en España ya han salvado muchas vidas aunque hace falta un esfuerzo más en la sección Ciencia Crítica de eldiario.es, en el que utilizábamos ajustes exponenciales y logísticos para explicar la evolución del número de casos y del número de fallecimientos por Covid-19 en España.

Te ofrecemos aquí una actualización periódica de los datos y gráficas, así como algunas explicaciones sencillas sobre su cálculo y evolución.

Digital conservation in biosphere reserves

In the “digital conservation” age, big data from Earth observations and from social media have been increasingly used to tackle conservation challenges. In this paper, led by Sofía Vaz from IISTA-CEAMA (Granada, Spain), we combined information from those two digital sources in a multimodel inference framework to identify, map, and predict the potential for nature's cultural contributions to people in two contrasting UNESCO biosphere reserves: Doñana and Sierra Nevada (Spain).

The content analysis of social media photographs showed a dominance of different categories of nature's cultural contributions, in agreement with the natural and cultural capital of these biosphere reserves. Those contributions also related with different Earth observation predictors, being mostly shaped by visual‐sensory attributes that characterize Doñana landscapes, and by points of leisure interest, landscape heterogeneity, and environmental accessibility that shape Sierra Nevada. The analytical framework proposed in this study is reproducible in other (protected) areas, and it can aid in the cost‐efficient monitoring of nature's contributions to people.


Vaz, AS; Moreno‐Llorca, RA; Gonçalves, JF; Vicente, JR; Méndez, PF; Revilla, E; Santamaria, L; Bonet‐García, FJ; Honrado, JP; Alcaraz‐Segura, D (2020) Digital conservation in biosphere reserves: Earth observations, social media, and nature's cultural contributions to people. Conservation Letters, e12704. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12704