MADRID (AP) – As soon as the lifeless body is quietly pushed away on a stretcher, a cleaning battalion moves into the guard unit. In a few minutes, the bed where the 72-year-old woman has been fighting for another breath for more than two weeks is rubbed clean, and the walls of glass are insulated by a struggler.
There is little time to think about what just happened, as death makes way for the possibility of saving another life.
“Our greatest source of joy, of course, is to empty a bed, but because someone is being dismissed and not because he has died,” said Ignacio Pujol, head of this ICU in Madrid. “There’s a little room for someone else to get another chance.”
As a resurgence of infections once again puts Spain’s public health system on the line, nurse Isabel Zendal Hospital, which employs Pujol, is given a new opportunity by many to consider it an excessive vanity. to prove its usefulness.
The facility is named after the 19th-century Spanish nurse who vaccinated smallpox across the Atlantic, and was built within 100 days at a cost of $ 157 million (more than twice the original budget). It boasts three pavilions and support buildings over an area of ten football fields, which look somewhere between a small airport terminal and an industrial warehouse, with ventilation ducts, medical beds and modern equipment. The original project was for 1,000 beds, about half of which have been installed so far.
The Zendal starts on December 1 for a roar of rival fanfare and criticism, just as Spain seems to be dampening a surge of coronavirus infections after the summer. By mid-December, it had received only a handful of patients.
But Spain recorded more than 84,000 new COVID-19 infections on Monday, the highest increase in one weekend since the pandemic began. The country’s total count is on the way to 2.5 million cases with 53,000 confirmed virus deaths, although statistics for excessive deaths add more than 30,000 deaths to it.
As the infection curve weakened after Christmas and New Year, the Zendal became busy. On Monday, 392 patients were treated, more than in any other hospital in the vicinity of 6.6 million.
The increase in Spain follows similar increases in other European countries, especially in the UK following the discovery of a new virus variant that experts say is more contagious. The London Nightingale, one of the temporary hospitals in the UK designed to ease the pressure on the country’s overwhelming healthcare system, has also reopened for patients and as a vaccination center.
Spain’s top health officials say they have found no evidence that new varieties that wreak havoc elsewhere contribute to its own infections in any way.. Some experts argue that the fact that the country’s limited ability to track cases of coronavirus distorts reality and that a new homeland is needed.
On the spot, increasing hospitalizations for the virus surpass the peak of the second revival. Nearly one in five hospital beds has a patient with COVID-19. The new disease also occupies a third of the ICU capacity in the country and non-urgent operations are already being stopped.
Left by some medical experts, left-wing politicians and labor unions accuse Madrid’s Conservative government of spending on hardware that draws votes, instead of strengthening a public health system that they have underfunded for years. Investing in contact tracing and primary care before, they say, could completely ward off the need for a Zendal.
“Instead of the success they boast of, the filling of this temporary hospital is a tremendous failure of those at the helm of responding to the pandemic, and also a failure of all of us as a society that could have done better, said Ángela Hernández. , a spokesman for the most important union for medical workers in Madrid, AMYTS.
The last straw for the unions, she said, was the regional government firing medical staff who refused to give up their jobs in ordinary hospitals when they were reassigned to Zendal.
“The project was nonsense from start to finish,” Hernández said. “Single beds without adequate staff do not make a hospital.”
Fernando Prados, manager of Zendal, says he does not mind the debate, but the 750 patients who have been treated in the past month and a half have already taken considerable pressure off other hospitals.
“We’ve already contributed in some way,” Prados said. “We know our COVID patients will continue and once the pandemic is over, this infrastructure will be here for any other emergency.”
Beyond automatic glass doors, patients recover in 8-bed modules, leaving little room for privacy but offering better monitoring of possible complications in their recovery, said Verónica Real, whose challenge as chief nurse was to organize staff teams from other hospitals.
“Some of the sanitation workers are coming up with some anger for all the noise out there about our hospital,” Real said. “But here the attitude has changed completely.”
The managers of Zendal say a modern ventilation system renews the air every 5 minutes, which contributes to a safer working environment. But they are very proud of the expansion of the interim respiratory system, where patients receive different types of breathing to overcome pneumonia.
The head of the unit, Pedro Landete, says that by possibly aggravating patients in one of his 50 well-equipped beds, they reduce the number of people who later need the more demanding intensive care.
José Andrés Armada arrived at the facility with mild symptoms after all his family was infected, despite what he said was a very careful approach to the pandemic. But the 63-year-old’s health deteriorated rapidly and he was on the verge of intubation in one of Zendal’s dozen ICU boxes last week.
‘I know the economy is something to protect, but health is more important. We’ll have to be in the lock by now. You can not have pubs and other places open, ”said the former entrepreneur.
“I never thought it would attack you in that way.”
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AP reporter Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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