Cristina Hodgson
TWO years and ten million infections after the first case of coronavirus in Spain, there are still some municipalities that can boast to being the last strongholds in this global pandemic.
After six waves, the last one particularly contagious due to the omicron variant, some 76 of Spain’s 8,131 municipalities are still free of the virus.
This figure does not include Castilla y Leon, which reports by health zones and not by localities, or Catalunya, which only provides data on towns with more than 200 inhabitants—none of which have been spared from infection.
According to data provided by the health departments of the different autonomous communities the region with the most villages which stand undefeated by the pandemic is Castile-La Mancha, with 30, followed by Aragon (24), La Rioja (13), Valencia (7) and Andalucia and the Canary Islands (1 each).
THE KEY TO ZERO CONTAGION
As stated by to Salvador Peiro, a researcher at the Fundacion de Investigacion Sanitaria y Biomedica de la Comunidad Valenciana (FISABIO), ‘the key’ to zero contagion is that all the villages without reported COVID-19 cases since the onset of the pandemic have a very low population count, most don’t exceed 100 residents, additionally ‘they have not had any external introduction’ – that is to say that few people have left the municipality and few have entered.
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