The death toll from the coronavirus fell to 683 in Spain on Thursday, after rising for two days, with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez urging people to keep up the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The country, one of the worst hit by the pandemic, has now recorded 15,238 coronavirus deaths.

However, there has been growing speculation that the death toll may have grossly underestimated.

According to the authorities, the number of deaths in retirement homes could be five times as high as that announced by health officials, who have not included almost 3,500 deaths of people who had not been tested for the virus.

The number of daily new cases also dropped slightly Thursday, that brought the total to 152,446. More than 50,000 have recovered.

Addressing to the parliament on Thursday, the prime minister said, “The fire started by the pandemic is starting to come under control”.

“Our priority now is not to turn back, especially not to return to our starting point, not to lower our guard”, Sanchez further added.

Spain has been subject to a strict lockdown since March 14 which has been reinforced in the past two weeks by the cessation of all non-essential activities until the Easter weekend.

The lower house of parliament was expected later Thursday to extend the confinement to April 25.

Last week, Spain has suspended the use of Chinese kits to detect coronavirus after being found to be faulty.

Experts have reached a conclusion that the kits from China are failing to detect positive corona cases. Spanish newspaper El Pais in a report said that the Chinese kits have only 30 percent sensitivity and are able to detect only 30 percent of the positive cases whereas the tests need to be at least 80 percent sensitive to be effective.

Earlier, Princess Maria Teresa of Spain has died after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, becoming the first royal victim of the disease.

A week earlier, the Archduke of Austria Karl von Habsburg became the first royal to test positive for COVID-19.

China has reported 42 new coronavirus cases, including 38 imported infections, taking the total tally to 81,907, health officials said on Friday, as the country started a new trial of re-testing the recovered COVID-19 patients amid heightened concern of a rebound of the deadly disease.

Meanwhile, the death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 90,000 worldwide on Thursday, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.