It pays to wait instead of knocking up an article after a first announcement – things rarely are as they seem and politicians change their minds.

Several newspapers ran with the Government announcement that there had been zero deaths within 24 hours on Monday, yet the figures don’t really tally. Today the Government has announced the second day with no deaths but again the provincial figures indicated the opposite.

According to the PM’s medical team, there was a total of 10 deaths during the last week leading up to Monday, whereas the figures handed over by the autonomous governments totalled around 35, so what gives?

There has long been an anomaly with Monday figures because the weekend data from Madrid and Barcelona – the two hardest hit areas of Spain – are late handing over the totals ,so that on Mondays the number given is very low then the next day it rebounds as the total figures are finally computed – we’re talking about deaths, by the way.

So, when Madrid and Barcelona report a dozen deaths on Monday, they don’t correspond to Monday, but rather to Friday, Saturday or Sunday – herein lies the confusion. But this reasoning does not dispel the doubt over there having been no deaths anywhere in Spain on Monday or yesterday.

So, don’t believe everything you read on a Monday because the true figures will eventually leak out.

Then we come to some newspapers eagerly reporting that the Central Government was contemplating allowing residents of provinces on a Phase-Three level to visit each other on inter-provincial trips, even travelling over into other autonomous regions on the same level. Yesterday evening, however, the Government announced that they had decided against it.

Reading between the lines when the original announcement was made it becomes apparent that at the time the PM was desperately bargaining with all and sundry to push through the next Lock Down extension and that this “free-movement announcement” was little more than a sweetener to convince regional parties to back the Government, but once it had become clear that these parties were not really needed, the free movement idea was shelved.

The moral of the story… wait and see before breaking out the party balloons.

(News: Spain)