Nursing homes in Spain, the drama of deaths without clarification

Armando G. Tejeda

Correspondent

Newspaper La Jornada
Monday February 27, 2023, p. 5

Madrid. Around 99,000 people have died from covid-19, according to official statistics from the Ministry of Health, although that figure could reach 170,000, according to other scientific reports. But if there is a dark area that fills thousands of citizens with indignation, it is the lack of information about what happened in nursing homes, where it is estimated that close to 35,000 people afflicted with the virus died and many did not receive any kind of health care, among other reasons because they were relegated by the public system itself.

There was even talk of a circular from the Madrid government, chaired by the right-wing Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in which it was recommended not to give priority to the elderly in residences.

Mercedes Huerta is a relative of one of the people who died in the residences. She, like so many others, asked for information and was denied, tried to visit their loved ones and was not allowed to even go near the door, and when they demanded an explanation for the sudden death of their mothers, fathers or siblings, He sent them an informative document with bureaucratic and cold language.

Furthermore, many of them had to wait weeks, even months, to receive the cremated remains of their relatives. I have felt abandoned, disappointed and something that I will never be able to understand: how a society can participate in a massacre of these characteristics, unique in a democracy, and that still no one has taken measures to ensure that justice is done and, above all, so that never be repeated againsays Mercedes Huerta.

Of the 35,000 deaths in nursing homes, the majority were concentrated in the autonomous regions with the highest population density and which had a higher percentage of elderly people. In other words, the trickle of deaths in nursing homes was recorded massively in Madrid, Catalonia, Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia, Aragon and Navarra. But the deaths in these places and with more or less the same obscurantism were registered throughout the country, which makes the relatives of those affected suspect that there was a surreptitious guideline with which the elderly were relegated to the younger citizens. or healthier.

To clarify facts that still remain in the dark, hundreds of affected relatives created the Truth and Justice Platform, with which they demand in the streets and in the institutions that the facts be clarified, that they be given a convincing explanation about the protocols that were activated during those days, especially during the first three or four months, when there was more lack of control and lack of information.

Amnesty International documented up to five human rights violations committed against the elderly residents continuously during those months. Specifically, for violation of the right to life, health, non-discrimination, private and family life and the right to a dignified death. And they point to six State institutions as responsible for this drama and for the prevailing impunity: the central government, the autonomous governments, the Congress of Deputies, the State Attorney General’s Office, the Ombudsman’s Office and the General Council of the Judiciary .

On the other hand, despite the general trend of impunity, in a few exceptions progress has been made in the provincial prosecutor’s offices. In Catalonia, the Mataró prosecutor’s office opened proceedings and filed a complaint last April 2022 for reckless homicide, injuries and mistreatment against the director and medical director of a residence during the pandemic. In Madrid, a judge requested the appearance as witnesses of Alberto Reyero, former Councilor for Social Policies of the Community of Madrid, and Carlos Mur, at that time director of Socio-Health Coordination and signatory of the exclusion protocols for referral to hospitals.

The data from the Institute for the Elderly and Social Services confirm that the number of deaths in residences was significantly higher than the rest of the age ranges and that by autonomous communities, Madrid is the region where the most elderly died from coronavirus, followed by Catalonia, Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha.

The only positive prevention data that benefited nursing homes is that nursing homes for the elderly, people with disabilities and other institutionalized groups were the first target of the vaccination plan that started in Spain on December 27, 2020. The Ministry of Health offered during Information about the immunization of these groups had been available for some time, but it stopped doing so on June 2, 2021. Until then, 93.3 percent had completed the regimen and 99.7 percent had received at least one dose.

But people like Mercedes Huerta warn that they will continue their fight until they know all the details of this silenced and dark drama. Because they insist on an idea that eats at them every day: Our relatives did not die, they were left to die.