Forecasts point to more than 37,000 new cases being reached on January 7th, said Marta Temido, stressing that the risk of effective transmission is at 1.3, which is "very high", with an estimated time of eight-day doubling.

“As we unfortunately anticipated, we are facing a very intense growth in the number of cases and this growth rate will probably continue in the coming days”, warned the minister.

"If we manage to responsibly comply with the measures that we have in place, our expectation is that we will be able to reduce this rate of transmission and gain time for more vaccination, for more protection," she said.