Spain nears 19,500 coronavirus deaths making it third highest in the world

After 585 deaths in the last 24 hours, Spain's death toll has increased to nearly 19,500 according to government figures showed on Friday.

Spain has revised it's counting mechanism which has made it difficult to compare the previous tolls and the total number of deaths now stands at 19,478. The figure is the third highest in the world after the United States and Italy.

The government has issued revised guidelines overnight for reporting deaths to homogenise data from the country's 17 autonomous regions in an apparent move to eliminate any deaths where the patient had not been tested for COVID-19.

But this methodology has stirred controversies between Madrid and Catalonia, which is also the worst-hit regions, they insist that there are thousands of more victims than the official counts.

"It must be recognised that that number of dead is much higher," Ignacio Aguado, vice-president of Madrid's regional government, told Spain's RNE radio.

"We're only talking about those who have died in hospital after testing positive, but people are also dying in old people's residences and at home without having being tested, so we will never know the real number (of deaths) in this tragedy."

After a downward spiral of the death rates, Friday's toll was the highest since Sunday's 619 death-mark.

A total of 72,963 have recovered from the deadly coronavirus in the country.

Spain reported 5,252 new cases for the coronavirus bringing the overall total to 188,068.