RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In Carmen Flores’ small office, the phone rings incessantly. Here in the Madrid working-class district of Carabanchel, on the ground floor of an apartment building, the patient protection organization ‘Defensor del Paciente’ is headquartered.
“Since the outbreak of the pandemic, we have been receiving dozens of calls every day,” says Carmen Flores, president of the association she founded 23 years ago. Never before has the elderly lady been so busy as over the past three months.
Most calls are about senior citizens who were not taken to hospital and died despite clear coronavirus symptoms. As a result, their care homes became death traps that could not be escaped, particularly as relatives were also denied access for visits at the peak of the pandemic. “We have already reported 300 of the 500 or so cases on my desk to the Prosecutor’s Office,” says Flores.
Among the more than 27,000 officially-recognized deaths that the pandemic has claimed in Spain to date, perhaps 20,000 were elderly people in care homes. In the capital region of Madrid alone, over 6,000 pensioners died in their homes. As the daily “El País” has now estimated, 15 percent of all senior citizens in Madrid died in care homes. Barcelona and the Castile-Léon region also reported an above-average number of cases.
Many deaths particularly in privately-run care homes
“They just let the old people die,” said Santiago Llorente, the mayor of the Madrid suburb of Leganés. The elderly were not taken to hospital, nor did the doctors come to the homes to see them. The mayor even sent police officers to the care homes. They were to investigate how and whether any help could be offered.
Carmen Flores says she represents victims throughout the country. The stacked files on her desk attest to the suffering of the bereaved. Luis de Miguel from Madrid, for one, complains that the Covid-19 symptoms of his 80-year-old mother in a care home in the suburb of Alcorcón were only treated with antibiotics. Despite severe respiratory distress and high fever, he says that a referral to the hospital was not approved.
As it later emerged, the home’s management followed the Madrid Health Authorities’ instructions not to send elderly people to the hospital. There, intensive care units were on the verge of collapse. As a result, de Miguel’s mother died alone and unassisted by a doctor. According to her son, it took another four days before the body was collected. Like many others, de Miguel, together with other victims’ relatives, founded a platform to keep the memory of the deceased alive and to take those responsible to Court.
Carmen Flores says it is striking that the deaths have been particularly frequent in private care homes. There are many complaints on Flores’ desk against Orpea, a group that operates 23 institutions in and around Madrid. “The private operators are saving on staff because the return on investment takes precedence over patient welfare,” says Flores. This has not changed since the peak of the crisis.
Serious accusations against the Madrid regional government
Yet the authorities are also faced with serious accusations. In Madrid, the conservative regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso is accused of being partly responsible for the death of the many senior citizens. Ultimately, it was the Health Authorities under her jurisdiction that instructed the 475 care homes in the region not to transfer Covid-19 patients with pre-existing conditions or cases requiring long-term care to hospitals.
Ayuso denies the allegations. The authorities claim they were not negligent but simply did what was possible under the circumstances.
The many victims in care homes also concern national politics. Vice-president Pablo Iglesias of the left-wing party Unidas Podemos (UP) accuses the conservatives of having betrayed the interests of the older generation by pushing ahead with the privatization of homes in recent years – two-thirds of the 5,000 or so care homes are privately owned.
Meanwhile, opposition leader Pablo Casado of the Partido Popular (PP) accuses Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of negligence and being partly to blame for the epidemic. His government, against its better judgment, failed to ban the mass rally on March 8th, International Women’s Day.
The accusation, which was based on a report by the Civil Guard, ultimately ended up in the Courts. A judge found insufficient evidence to indict and closed the case a few days ago.
Source: NZZ (Neue Zûrcher Zeitung)