Doctors Are Forced To Choose Who To Let Die | 27 March, 2020

In the emergency room at one of Madrid's biggest hospitals, Daniel Bernabeu signed the death certificate for one patient and immediately turned to help another who was choking.

People are dying in waiting rooms before they can even be admitted as the coronavirus pandemic overpowers medical staff. With some funeral services halted in the Spanish capital and no space left in the morgues, corpses are being stored at the main ice rink.

Intensive-care wards overflowing and new rules dictate that older patients miss out to younger people with a better shot at surviving, Bernabeu said by telephone. "That grandpa, in any other situation, would have had a chance," he said. "But there's so many of them, all dying at the same time."

As Covid-19 sweeps the continent, the focus is turning to Spain with dire warnings for parts of Europe such as the U.K. that only recently have taken more comprehensive action. The number of fatalities in the country of 47 million people is now rising faster than it did in China, where the virus first emerged, and faster than in Italy, where the disease took hold this month.

Spanish authorities reported another 738 people had lost their lives, making it the deadliest hotspot on Wednesday while elsewhere countries unveiled more measures to deal with the economic carnage. The daily count of fatalities dropped to 655 on Thursday. Spain's total death toll, now at 4,089, already overtook China's this week.

At La Paz hospital, the sprawling complex of 17 buildings, there were 240 people on the emergency room at one point on Tuesday waiting to be admitted. Doctors on the front line are not wearing full protection, just a cotton robe and a mask. They have the recommendation to keep a meter of distance with patients, but that's impossible.

The initial days were dizzying as Spaniards came to terms with unprecedented restrictions on their daily lives and Sanchez and tried to gear up the health care system for an avalanche of cases. With a critical shortage of intensive care beds, ventilators and protective gear, doctors feared they would be overwhelmed. And, in a stark warning to other European governments, so it came to pass.

In several care homes for the elderly, staff abandoned the residents to their fate. Army units mobilized to disinfect the facilities found some patients lying in squalor and others remained where they had died in their beds, Defense Minister Margarita Robles said on Monday.

The Health Ministry admitted that it didn't have the capacity to administer enough tests to track the spread of the contagion.

Doctors and nurses, meanwhile, are left to improvise as patient after patient arrives. Some tape garbage sacks to their arms to shield themselves. One nurse in the emergency room at a hospital in the Basque city of Vitoria said last week that protective plastic glasses are of such poor quality that medics can barely see through them when they feel for pulses.

Some 4,000 medical workers have been infected, the government said on Monday, about 12% of the total. That compares with 8% in Italy and 4% in China. A nurses' union in the Basque region is blaming the shortages for the death of a 52-year-old member.

The hope is that stricter efforts to keep people at home will start to bear fruit. Italy recorded marginally fewer new cases of the virus on Wednesday after three weeks of lockdown. Some 635 people have been arrested in Spain for breaching the terms of the quarantine and almost 77,000 have been sanctioned by the police and the civil guard.

(Source: NDTV)