La Rioja: Spain's worst-hit region leads way out of pandemic

Health authorities in La Rioja, famous for its rich red wine, are today toasting a remarkable turnaround from becoming Spain’s worst-hit region in terms of Covid-19 contagion to a sign of hope that the country’s epidemic can be kept under control by testing and tracing.

Far from Madrid and Barcelona, Spain’s densely-populated largest cities which have hosted massive outbreaks, the scenic wine region of La Rioja with its scattered hilltop villages might have seemed a less-than-likely location for coronavirus to take root.

But with more than 4,000 confirmed cases amongst a population of just 315,000, La Rioja has highest concentration of positives amongst all of Spain’s regions, although its total deaths of 360 is proportionally a better figure than badly-hit Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha.

After a funeral in the city of Vitoria, just over the La Rioja border in the Basque Country, was pinpointed as a super-spreader event in early March, a neighbourhood in the famous Rioja wine town of Haro became Spain’s first quarantined zone on March 7.

But the virus was already spreading, and from multiple sources.

“We became the Chernobyl of coronavirus. Everyone knows someone who has died,” said María José Dueñas, an economist who lives in the medieval La Rioja town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, located on the Saint James Way, which has registered 353 confirmed cases among a population of little more than 6,000.

Now La Rioja has brought its R transmission ratio well under one, has no patients in intensive care and has registered less than 30 new cases in the past two weeks.

Spain’s first major serological survey to check the level of immunity among the population revealed that La Rioja was ahead of the rest, not in prevalence of Covid-19, but in testing in that it had positively identified 50 per cent of cases.

“From minute one, we understood that the key to this was detecting which patients have Covid,” Alberto Lafuente, director of La Rioja’s health department, told The Telegraph.

Dr Lafuente said new hospital circuits were created to keep patients with respiratory symptoms separate from others, while responding to and treating as many patients at home as possible and setting up mobile public testing points for drivers to pull into. The region has performed 94 PCR tests per 1,000 inhabitants, double Spain’s national rate.

“Of positives, 75 per cent were treated at home and never went near a health centre, but the key was to trace contacts and start finding asymptomatic cases,” Dr Lafuente said.

La Rioja is halfway to its target of having 100 contact tracers on hand, and has also used SMS surveys and information from its Covid app to crunch data and identify suspected cases and potential hotspots.

“We are calm now that things are going well, and we are detecting as much as can be detected. But this doesn’t mean we don’t have to prepare health system for a second and third wave. It’s not just about treating patients but doing so in a quality way,” Dr Lafuente concluded.