I love your weekly blogcasts from Santiago and I hate to dilute your optimism about declining coronavirus figures for Spain. However, what you are seeing is a major change in the way Spanish coronavirus data is collected and reported, not a decline in infections. Since the beginning of September, the daily figures only include cases already validated by the Ministry of Health in their pdf report. Initially this gives a number of daily cases approximately 50% of those reported by the previous system. In the new system the full number of daily cases take over a week to be validated. When this has been done, the figures for the previous week are adjusted upward. As a result, making a comparison of last week (using the unadjusted figure) with the previous week's data (which will by then have been adjusted) will always show an apparent decline. All this is described by the Johns Hopkins University daily report which reports and comments on coronavirus data from every world country. If you click on this and follow the link in the figures for Spain to source, the official Spanish figures appear together with a health warning about the data. The unfortunate position is that infections in Spain are now growing again rapidly, as they are in neighbouring France and now also in the UK.
The R number shows the rate of change in the number of weekly infections. If the data shows an apparent decline of 50% (which it does), the R number will be 0.5 (which it is). Sadly this does not reflect what is actually happening. The famous quote popularised by American author Mark Twain comes to mind....'There are three kinds of lie; lies, damn lies and statistics'.