There were 7,291 people who died between March and April 2020 in residences in Madrid, during the first wave of covid. There were 7,291 people who, in addition, died in the “most horrible” way possible, according to one worker: suffocated, drowned, dehydrated, without sedation and alone, very alone, without being able to say goodbye to the people they loved. Four years later, the families of those 7,291 dead are still waiting for an investigation into what happened in these centers. The Prosecutor’s Office of Madrid does not consider it necessary, despite the fact that the suspicions that rights were violated by the regional administration remain. Neither is the denial of the duty of assistance, a crime specified in the Penal Code.
Those who have done so have been the associations of relatives who commissioned a group of experts to investigate what had happened (the commission created in the Madrid Assembly collapsed after last year’s elections and the Government of Ayuso refused to recover it). And so a citizens’ commission emerged, chaired by the emeritus judge of the Supreme Court, José Antonio Martín Pallín.
After ten months of intense work, this commission has published the report with clear conclusions: the largest of the residences were abandoned by the Community of Madrid which, by means of a protocol, established that the infected of covid with physical or cognitive dependence were not referred to hospitals.
In return, it was promised that the residences would be medicalized (it was ordered by the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid). But the reality is that they never were and the residents died in those spaces in the “horrific” way this worker described. Their bodies appeared in the bedrooms and in different rooms of the residences, the report says.
President Ayuso indicated a few weeks ago that those people would die anyway, something the report refutes: 65% of the oldest who were referred to hospitals during the months of March and April 2020 had a percentage of survival of 65%, which, applied to the 7,291 people who died in residences without being referred, would have meant that “more than 4,000 people could have saved their lives”, explained Fernando Lamata, doctor and expert in health management.
Lamata gave more data that proves the no-referral order: the number of transfers to hospitals went from 120 a day to an average of 65 between March 7 and 31, far from the 200 that should have been in the situation that was being experienced. “There was a closure in the derivations that had an impact on an excess of deaths”, pointed out Lamata.
And the problem is that there were beds, since even though the residences had not been medicalized, a temporary hospital was built in Ifema, with more than 1,300 beds and 3,000 professionals, where only 23 (mild) residents from centers were transferred public During the period of operation of the Ifema hospital, more than 5,000 people died in residences “without receiving medical attention”, this work points out.
During the pandemic, around 8,000 patients referred and financed by the Ministry of Health were treated in private hospitals in Madrid. These patients were referred from hospitals, but those in nursing homes were not allowed to be transferred unless they had private insurance.
“Despite the fact that it was advertised that the unified public-private system would work as a single hospital that would save many lives, the truth is that among these last ones there were not those of the elderly without private insurance”, the report points out.
And the hotels? 14 hotels with 1,036 beds were medicalized. At the time of greatest occupancy, 836 beds were used. “The referral of any resident to these hotels was not authorized”, he points out.
One thing that the Community of Madrid did authorize was that Samur health personnel (emergencies) “go to provide health care in Castilla y León”, but it is not recorded that Madrid requested help from other communities to attend to the residences , medicalize them or expand Ifema’s endowment. If it had been done, the Commission defends, “it would have been possible to adequately attend to the patients in the residences”.
In this way, the report points out, “the people who had their homes in the residential centers saw their fundamental rights seriously undermined: the right to be treated with dignity, the right to life, to the protection of health , to personal and family privacy, not to be discriminated against because of age, disability or illness”.
The members of the Commission also denounce that the regional Government infringed the right to health care and violated the right to life after “drastically reducing the transfers of patients from residences to hospitals” in the same period, “without having medicalized” the centers beforehand.
For all this, the report states that “the avoidable suffering and death of thousands of elderly people living in nursing homes was the result of perfectly conscious decisions, planned and maintained over time”.
And the Community of Madrid, what does it say? The Minister of Health, Fátima Matute, indicated that it causes her “a deep feeling of sadness” that the work carried out during the pandemic in nursing homes is questioned and criticized that it is a matter of “twisting the pain and using – it in a way, besides it doesn’t help anyone”. Matute defended the “impeccable” work that was done in Madrid to try to save lives in a situation “that overwhelmed everyone”.
Matute forgets, however, that it is the families who are looking for answers.
