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MADRID (AP) – As soon as the lifeless body is silently pushed back onto a stretcher, a cleaning battalion enters the intensive care box. Within minutes, the bed where the 72-year-old woman fought for more than two weeks for another breath is cleaned, the glass walls disinfected with a squeegee.
There is little time to think about what just happened, as death gives way to the possibility of saving another life.
“Our greatest source of joy is obviously to empty a bed, but because someone is fired and not because they have died,” said Ignacio Pujol, the head of this intensive care unit in Madrid. “It’s a small space for someone else to have another chance.”
As an outbreak of infections puts Spain’s public health system against the ropes again, nurse Isabel Zendal Hospital who employs Pujol, a project seen by many as an extravagant vanity company, gets another chance to prove her utility.
Named after the 19th-century Spanish nurse who was vaccinated against smallpox across the Atlantic Ocean, the facility was built in 100 days at a cost of 130 million euros ($ 157 million ), more than double the initial budget. It has three pavilions and support buildings on an area of 10 football fields, looking somewhere between a small airport terminal and an industrial warehouse, complete with ventilation air ducts, medical beds and equipment. peak. The original project involved 1,000 beds, of which about half have been installed so far.
Zendal opened to a roar of fanfare and competing criticism on December 1., just as Spain appeared to ease a post-summer surge in coronavirus infections. By mid-December he had only seen a handful of patients.
But Spain recorded more than 84,000 new COVID-19 infections on Monday, the biggest increase in a single weekend since the start of the pandemic. The country’s overall death toll stands at 2.5 million cases with 53,000 confirmed virus deaths, although excess mortality statistics add more than 30,000 deaths to that.
As the contagion curve intensified after Christmas and New Years, Zendal got busy. As of Monday, 392 patients were being treated, more than at any other hospital in the region of 6.6 million.
Spain’s outbreak follows similar increases in infection in other European countries, most notably the UK following the discovery of a new variant of the virus that experts deem more infectious. The London Nightingale, one of the temporary hospitals across Britain designed to ease pressure on the country’s overwhelmed healthcare system, has also reopened for patients and as a vaccination center.
Senior Spanish health officials insist they have found no evidence that new variants wreaking havoc elsewhere are contributing in any way to its own explosive infections. Some experts dispute that, saying the country’s limited ability to sequence coronavirus cases distorts reality and that a new stay-at-home order is needed.
On the ground, the increase in hospitalizations for the virus is already past the peak of the second outbreak. Nearly one in five hospital beds has a patient with COVID-19. The new disease also occupies a third of the country’s intensive care capacity, and elective surgeries have already been canceled.
Joined by some medical experts, left-wing politicians and workers’ unions accuse Madrid’s conservative government of spending on materials to attract votes instead of strengthening a public health system they have underfunded for years. Investing in contact tracing and primary care before, they say, could have avoided the need for a Zendal altogether.
“Rather than the success they brag about, the filling of this makeshift hospital represents a huge failure of those leading the pandemic response, and also a failure for all of us as a society that could have done better, ”said Ángela Hernández, spokesperson for the main union of medical workers in Madrid, AMYTS.
The last straw for the unions, she said, has been the regional government which has fired medical staff who refuse to give up their posts in regular hospitals when they are reassigned to Zendal.
“The project was insane from start to finish,” Hernández said. “A few beds without adequate staff don’t make a hospital.”
Fernando Prados, Zendal’s director, says he doesn’t mind the debate, but the 750 patients treated in the past month and a half have already relieved other hospitals.
“We’ve already contributed in one way or another,” Prados said. “We know that we will continue to have patients with COVID and that once the pandemic is over, this infrastructure will be there for any other emergency.”
Beyond the automatic glass doors, patients recover in 8-bed modules, leaving little room for privacy but offering better follow-up of possible complications during their recovery, said Verónica Real, whose challenge as that head nurse was to organize teams of staff from other hospitals.
“Some of the health workers come in with a certain degree of anger because of all the noise around our hospital,” Real said. “But once here the attitude changes completely.”
Zendal officials say that a modern ventilation system renews the air in the entire facility every 5 minutes, which contributes to a safer working environment. But they’re very proud of the expansion of the Intermediate Respiratory Care Unit, where patients are given different types of assisted breathing to overcome lung inflammation.
Unit chief Pedro Landete says that by admitting potentially worsening patients to one of its 50 highly-equipped beds, they are reducing the number of people who will need intensive care afterwards. more demanding.
José Andrés Armada arrived at the facility with mild symptoms after his entire family became infected despite what he said was a very cautious approach to the pandemic. But the 63-year-old’s health quickly deteriorated, and last week he was about to be intubated in one of Zendal’s dozens of intensive care boxes.
“I know the economy is something to safeguard, but health is more important. We should be stuck now. You can’t have bars and other places open, ”said the former entrepreneur.
“I never imagined it could attack you like that.
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AP reporter Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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