MADRID: Spain's daily virus toll rose slightly on Saturday with 378 people dying, the health ministry said, a day after registering the lowest number of fatalities in four weeks.
The number was slightly higher than Friday's figure of 367, raising the overall death toll in Spain to 22,902, the third-highest figure in the world after the United States and Italy.
The overall number of infections has now passed 223,759, a figure that includes those shown to have developed antibodies against the virus.
However, the health ministry has begun using only the number of cases confirmed by PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, or swab tests, giving a figure of 205,905 -- 2,944 of which were detected in the last 24 hours.
The move came as Spain passed an important landmark in its fight against the virus on Friday, with the daily number of recoveries outpacing the number of new infections for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
"Every day, the epidemic improves a little," said Fernando Simon, the ministry's emergencies coordinator, while warning against "excessive euphoria" and stressing the need to "keep up our collective responsibility".
Spain has been ramping up the use of antibody tests, which show whether a person's immune system has developed defences against coronavirus, to determine whether or not they had been infected.
Increased testing would allow officials to begin gathering data on the overall number of people infected, Simon said, ruling out any mass testing of people who have not shown symptoms.
Health officials have said the epidemic peaked on April 2 when 950 people died over 24 hours, nearly three weeks after the government imposed a nationwide lockdown that confined almost 47 million citizens to home to slow the spread of the virus.
On Sunday, Spain is to start allowing children out for up to an hour a day in the first steps towards easing one of the world's toughest lockdowns.
The measure, which comes into effect on Sunday morning, means under-14s will be able to go out once a day for one hour between 9:00 am and 9:00 pm.
So far, 95,708 people have been declared free of the virus, 3,353 of them in the past 24 hours.
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