Different country responses, different numbers - Aragón (Spain)

Aragón is the beloved land where all my genes come from and, to make it more heartfelt, were the next generation of my family is growing up. I have been following up the cases there with great concern because I know how aged the population is and how many cardiac surgeries my own relatives have gone through in the last few years; two factors, age and pre-existing cardiac conditions, that make COVID-19 lethal. They have released the cases segregated by severity and the picture looks totally wrong to me.

Data up of 24th March by the Dirección General de Salud Pública in Aragón, Spain (graph made with Flourish) Only 337 out of 758 cases did not require hospitalization

This is not the graph that a region should show if the country had been preparing for over a month for this virus to arrive. A disease that in 90% of the cases develops with mild or even no symptoms, cannot look like a condition that sends to hospital or kills more than half of the affected individuals. This suggests that the testing is not being done as a preventive measure, the way Korea did to isolate each and every positive case and flatten the curve in two weeks. This suggests that testing has been only reactive to cases appearing and patients asking for help.

It is true that we haven't seen anything like this in our lifetime, and that is not an easy problem to tackle, but we have watched it progress from the far East to our sitting room without doing anything to prepare for it. A new batch of test kits has arrived this weekend and we all hope that it will not be too late to contain the spread. The damage to our elders is done. For the last month, they have seen the virus come closer without anyone doing anything to stop it from killing them.

Age distribution of COVID-19 cases requiring ICU or ending in death; Male (Hombres) and Female (Mujeres) - source National Surveillance -

Everyone talks about the general lethality rate of the virus being somewhere between 2 and 4%, but the percentage of death among 80+ is 15%. Do you know what happened in Spain 80years ago? WAR. Civil war. And afterwards? Poverty, famine, medieval misery. The people we are loosing to this virus were the miracle children of the war. Some were born during the war. Some a few years before or after. They survived violence and oppression, malnutrition and diseases. They built with their own hands the country that today is letting them die of a coronavirus. I am too mad to write today. It's just not fair that we let them go without putting up a proper fight.