“They called me and told me they were going to take my mother down to the basement -1, which was where they left all the sick people who had no solution.” It is one of the overwhelming testimonies that the film collects. 7291which will premiere on November 13 at the Verdi cinemas in Madrid.
“They killed my father. They gave him palliatives before knowing the results of the tests of covid that they had done to her,” says another of the relatives who appears in this documentary, directed and produced by an independent filmmaker from Madrid, Juanjo Castro.
Your title is not just a number, they are 7,291 men and women of flesh and blood who were denied hospital care and they died, in many cases, alone and unattended, in the nursing homes in the Community of Madrid during the first two months of the pandemicbetween March and April 2020.
Synthesize the tragedy
Life, health and non-discrimination were fundamental human rights that those people were then trampled upon, that they died without knowing what was happening or what they had done to deserve it.
“I have tried to synthesize something very complex, which has many edges and that it is very controversial from a political point of view,” Castro pointed out this Wednesday at the Ateneo in Madrid, at the press presentation of his film.
“As citizens in a democratic society, we have to take responsibility politicians of their actions and decisions. New elections cannot erase a bad decision,” he added.
Exclusion protocol
It refers to fateful action protocol in the residences issued by the Directorate of Socio-Health Coordination of the Community of Madrid on March 21. The document contained exclusion criteria, by which older people with a certain degree of dependency or disability should not be referred to a hospital in case of contracting covid.
“This did not make sense, because the majority of the people in a residence would fall into this category,” comments Álvaro Reyero in the tape, who was Social Policies Counselor of the CAM and denounced at the time that these protocols “were not ethical.” and possibly not legal,” also author of the book They will die undignified.
But not even those who were not dependent were spared. In practice, the slogan of no bypass was applied en bloc to all the residents who were in the CAM centers, automatically. Elderly people living in nursing homes were denied their right to healthcaresomething that did not happen with those who lived at home.
Lidia Sánchez, director of a Madrid residence, recalled before the Investigation Commission of the Madrid Assembly how from March 13 to 31 she could not send anyone to the hospital because, when she tried, the hospital’s geriatric service rejected him. . Were there people who, if they could have been referred, would not have died at the residence? “Without a doubt”reply.
The film portrays how the head of this protocol, Carlos Mur, never tired of claiming that it was not mandatory, but “only technical recommendations.” However, it was followed as an order by the residences.
Perhaps, for this reason, in the Community of Madrid a percentage of elderly people died twice as high as in the next largest community in Spain, Catalonia. One in five elderly people in Madrid residences did not survive to confinement.
The terror on their faces
But the residences They were not that protective refuge that some wanted us to believe. There was no staff – more than 50% were on sick leave – there were no resources and there was a great lack of coordination between the primary care area, social services and senior centers, explains the journalist Manuel Rico in the documentary.
“You could see the terror in his face,” confesses another of the nursing home workers, referring to the elderly. “They coughed quietly, they were terrified because they knew that if they coughed they would take them away They didn’t know where or why.”
The documentary tells the tragedy in several actswith testimonies from the politicians involved at that time, from workers and directors of residences and, above all, from the family members who continue to fight for the injustice that took the lives of their parents to be recognized.
His are the most heartbreaking stories in this film, which remind us the human drama behind political errors. Starting March 9, 2020many relatives begin to panic when they are prohibited from entering the residence to see their elders.
“They don’t pick up the phone”
“We have zero information from the residence. They don’t take our calls,” recalls the daughter of one of the deceased. another complaint “misinformation and lies”: “They told us that everything was fine, that we had nothing to worry about. Until the worker who was giving us the information broke down one day and He acknowledged that there were many affected and that there were already six dead“. We were just at the beginning of March 2020.
When families began to be informed that their elders were seriously ill and asked to be taken to the hospital, the next blow came. “They told us that it was not possible, that there were no ambulances, that they could only give them palliative treatment“.
Then, the order came to isolate those possibly infected in their rooms. “Some didn’t even have a table to eat. You couldn’t serve everyone. It’s very difficult to contain a person with Alzheimer’s locked up. On, [los trabajadores] We were disguised with garbage bags, we looked like Martians. The elderly did not know what was happening, they saw how they took away their roommates,” recalls one of the assistants of a residence.
“I have gone so far as to leave a meal one day and, when returning to my shift the next day, go through the same room and find the same food where I waswithout touching,” he acknowledges.
An injustice that demands reparation
“I have tried give voice to people“, Castro commented this Wednesday about his documentary. “I wanted to give the information without bias, in the most objective way possible,” he explains. To do this, he uses the statements of the actors involved before the Investigation Commission of the Madrid Assembly and the Citizen Commission for the Truth in the Residences of Madrid.
“We have to see what happened and try to solve it in the future. Unfortunately, this is not the case, we stay the same. No measures are being taken to solve this problem in residences.” Today, Spain’s spending on providing resources to public residences continues to be well below the European average.
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