Spain first in western Europe to hit 1 million virus cases

Spain has become the first country in western Europe to accumulate more than 1 million confirmed COVID-19 infections as the nation of 47 million struggles to contain a resurgence of the virus.

Spain’s health ministry said Wednesday that its accumulative case load since the start of the pandemic reached 1,005,295 after reporting 16,973 more cases in the past 24 hours.

The ministry attributes 34,366 deaths to COVID-19. Experts say the real numbers of infections and deaths are probably much higher because insufficient testing, asymptomatic cases and other issues impede authorities from capturing the true scale of the outbreak.