Spain reports over 500 deaths in last 24 hours

The number of daily coronavirus fatalities registered by the Spanish Health Ministry came in at 523 on Wednesday, slightly down from the day before.

According to the latest figures, new infections rose in the last 24 hours by 3% of the total, to reach 177,633 since the outbreak started in Spain - a slight rise in the contagion rate.

There have been 18,579 coronavirus-related deaths registered by the Spanish health authorities so far, while 70,850 patients have recovered and discharged from hospitals.

The number of daily deaths in Spain peaked on April 2 with 950 people. Since then, the trend has slowly been decreasing, albeit with several upticks in particular after weekends and public holidays, which have seen underreporting of cases.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) emerged in late 2019 in China's Hubei province, and the virus has spread to 210 countries and territories since then.

To date, COVID-19 cases surpassed 2,000,000 globally, resulting in more than 480,000 recoveries and over 120,000 deaths.

On February 11, the WHO officially named the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as COVID-19, and on March 11, declared it a pandemic.