MADRID (AP) – As soon as the lifeless body is silently pushed on a stretcher, a cleaning battalion moves to the intensive care box. In a matter of minutes, the bed where the 72-year-old woman struggled for more than two weeks for another breath is rubbed and cleaned, the glass walls that insulate her are disinfected with a squeegee.
There is little time to reflect on what has just happened, as death gives way to the possibility of saving another life.
“Our biggest source of joy is obviously emptying a bed, but because someone was discharged and not because they died,” said Ignacio Pujol, head of this Madrid ICU. “It’s a small space for someone else to have another chance.”
While a wave of infections is once again pitting Spain’s public health system against the ropes, the Hospital Nurse Isabel Zendal that employs Pujol, a project seen by many as an extravagant vanity company, is having a new opportunity to prove its utility.
Named after the 19th-century Spanish nurse who took the smallpox vaccine in the Atlantic Ocean, the facility was built in 100 days at a cost of 130 million euros ($ 157 million), more than double the original budget . It has three pavilions and support buildings in an area equivalent to 10 soccer fields, between a small airport terminal and an industrial warehouse, with ventilation ducts, medical beds and the latest equipment. The original project was 1,000 beds, of which about half have already been installed.
Zendal opened with a bang of fanfare and competing criticism on December 1, in the same way that Spain seemed to decrease the post-summer increase in coronavirus infections. By mid-December, he had received only a handful of patients.
But Spain on Monday registered more than 84,000 new COVID-19 infections, the biggest increase in a single weekend since the pandemic began. The country’s overall count is moving towards 2.5 million cases with 53,000 confirmed virus deaths, although surplus mortality statistics add more than 30,000 deaths to that.
As the contagion curve intensified after Christmas and the New Year, Zendal became agitated. As of Monday, 392 patients were being treated, more than at any other hospital in the 6.6 million region.
The increase in Spain follows similar increases in infection in other European countries, mainly in the United Kingdom, after the discovery of a new variant of the virus that, according to experts, is more infectious. London Nightingale, one of the temporary hospitals across Britain designed to relieve pressure on the country’s overburdened healthcare system, has also reopened for patients and as a vaccination center.
Spain’s leading health officials insist they have found no evidence that new variants, causing havoc elsewhere, are contributing in any way to the increase in infections. Some experts dispute that, claiming that the country’s limited ability to sequence coronavirus cases is distorting reality and that a new order to stay at home is needed.
On the ground, the increase in hospitalizations for the virus already exceeds the peak of the second resurgence. Almost one in five hospital beds has a patient with COVID-19. The new disease is also occupying a third of the country’s ICU capacity and non-urgent surgery is already being suspended.
Together with some medical experts, left-wing politicians and workers’ unions, they accuse Madrid’s conservative government of spending on equipment to attract votes, rather than reinforcing a public health system that they have been underfunding for years. Investing previously in contact tracking and primary care, they say, could have avoided the need for a Zendal.
“More than the success they boast, the filling of this makeshift hospital represents a tremendous failure for those who are in charge of responding to the pandemic, and also a failure for all of us as a society that could have done better,” said Ángela Hernández , spokesman for the main medical workers’ union in Madrid, AMYTS.
The last straw for unions, she said, has been the regional government sacking medical teams that refuse to leave their regular hospital positions when they are transferred to Zendal.
“The project has been absurd from start to finish,” said Hernández. “Some beds without adequate staff do not make a hospital.”
Fernando Prados, manager of Zendal, says he doesn’t care about the debate, but the 750 patients treated in the last month and a half have already taken significant pressure off other hospitals.
“We have already contributed in one way or another,” said Prados. “We know that we will continue to have patients with COVID and as soon as the pandemic ends, this infrastructure will be here for any other emergency.”
Passing through automatic glass doors, patients recover in 8-bed modules, leaving little space for privacy, but providing better monitoring of possible complications in their recovery, said Verónica Real, whose challenge as head nurse has been to organize care teams. employees from other hospitals.
“Some of the health workers arrive with a degree of anger at all the noise that is over our hospital,” said Real. “But, once here, the attitude changes completely.”
Zendal’s managers say that a modern ventilation system renews all the air in the facility every 5 minutes, which contributes to a safer working environment. But they are most proud of the expansion of the intermediate respiratory treatment unit, where patients receive various types of assisted breathing to overcome lung inflammation.
The head of the unit, Pedro Landete, says that by admitting potentially aggravating patients to one of his 50 well-equipped beds, they are reducing the number of people who are in need of more demanding intensive care.
José Andrés Armada arrived at the facility with mild symptoms after his entire family was infected, despite what he said was a very careful approach to the pandemic. But the 63-year-old man’s health deteriorated rapidly and last week he was about to be intubated in one of Zendal’s dozens of ICU cases.
“I know that the economy is something to safeguard, but health is more important. We must be blocked now. You can’t have bars and other places open, ”said the former businessman.
“I never imagined he could attack you like that.”
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AP reporter Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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