With 200 dead and more than 1,200 infections, nursing homes have become the main focus of the pandemic in Galicia. Despite seeing what was happening in other communities, the same thing ended up happening here. “We reacted late and wrong”, assures in SER Miguel Ángel Vázquez, president of the Galician Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics.
Vázquez believes that the coronavirus crisis has revealed that society lives with its back to the elderly. He prefers not to enter into the differences between public and private residences, insists that it is the coronavirus that has taken the lives of many older people, considers that infected people have not been isolated as they should have been.
How did we get here?
March, 19, Residence of the Little Sisters of Caldas. The Xunta publishes the first positive confirmed by coronavirus in a senior center in Galicia. Fifteen days had passed since the first known contagion in our community, a 49-year-old man who came to do a job interview in Galicia, and the virus reached the nursing homes. In fact, he had arrived earlier, but on March 19 the first positive was found in a PCR test. The virus had been circulating in these centers for weeks. That’s one of the causes of the rapid spread of Covid-19 in residences, and the delay in testing users and workers with symptoms …
Protective equipment missing
Without sufficient masks, without PPE, the individual protection equipment, the coronavirus, as has happened in other communities, ended up spreading through residential centers in the four provinces. All unions have denounced the shortage of protective material. A month later, the Galician residences registered 200 deaths, more than 1,000 active cases of contagion, and this taking into account that only half of the 20,000 elderly people who reside in nursing homes have been tested.
The situation ended up overflowing
Forcing the Xunta to activate an emergency protocol. two integrated residences, one in Santiago and the other in Baños de Molgas, to enter patients with Covid who could not be seen at their center. Residences that were improvised from one day to the next, how Catia Vázquez, one of the workers who was urgently called to join the Baños de Molgas residence in Ourense, tells us. The Xunta took this measure before the virulent spread of the virus, and decided to intervene the two residences with the most infections. The cases were then counted by hundreds, especially in centers managed by the company DomusVi.
A highly privatized sector
In Galicia there are 223 residences. Of these, the Xunta only directly manages 24, the rest are, for the most part, in the hands of private companies, foundations and religious entities. Specifically, DomusVi and the Fundación San Rosendo manage most of the places. There are some municipally-owned residences, others managed by foundations and religious entities, but the vast majority of the 20,000 places that exist today, around 80 percent, they are privately managed. Given the criticism they are receiving for the management of this crisis, from the Galician association of private residences they point to the Xunta in this distribution of blame. Almost all deaths and infections, until now, have occurred in these private residences.
The counterpoint is found in public residences
There is only evidence of one death in a public nursing home, and about twenty confirmed coronavirus patients. There are even clean Covid-19 centers, without any contagion. It is the case of care center for the elderly in Ortigueira, which belongs to the Consortium of Social Services created by the bipartite chaired by Emilio Pérez Touriño. It has 50 residents and 35 workers. Since the first cases appeared in the municipality, prevention measures to avoid infections were extreme, as does not explain Araceli Collado, the director of the center, proud of the work of their entire team.
A public service versus a private sector in which the market rules. We will have to take note thinking about a model change that seems necessary once the pandemic passes.
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