Ximo Puig says that the Valencian Community is putting together a bid to central government for 150 of the 2,000 Army trackers that the Prime Minister has made available last Tuesday.
It is understood that they will be used in the Valencian capital and its metropolitan area, where the population of approximately 1.6 million inhabitants, have seen the number of cases grow in recent days.
Murcia has already submitted a request for trackers and the communities of Cantabria, Galicia and Castilla y León have also announced that they will be asking the Government for support.
Despite initial reluctance, Murcia was the first community to announce, late on Wednesday, that it has requested 60 trackers from the armed forces.
Health will now evaluate these requests and send them to the Ministry of Defence so that it can assign the military personnel to each territory. The goal is for the process to be carried out very quickly.
“It will be done immediately and the communities will receive the trackers they need, for as long as necessary,” the undersecretary of Defence, Amparo Valcarce, explained.
Infections have risen sharply since Spain lifted the lockdown, but deaths have been much lower than during the epidemic’s peak.
The country has more than 400,000 confirmed cases of the respiratory disease, the highest in Western Europe, and one of the fastest growth rates on the continent.
Nearly 29,000 people have died, one of the world’s highest death tolls.
