On March 8, 2020, when Spain suddenly woke up to the monstrosity of the pandemic, the Community of Madrid ordered to confine the 44,000 elderly people who lived in public, private and subsidized residences. In addition, the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso ordered not to transfer to the hospital those who were dependent or had cognitive illnesses in protocols that were sent from the Ministry of Health to senior health officials, the so-called “protocols of shame.”
They would be cared for inside because the senior centers were going to be medicalized, as the president announced in an interview on Telecinco and promised an official announcement from the Community of Madrid. In practice the opposite happened: the elderly were locked up, with little protective material, with worn-out insoles and without being able to see their families. The high concentration of infected people without minimal isolation or hygiene measures did the rest. The result: 9,469 residents died in the first 60 days of the pandemic. 7,291 of them died without being referred to hospitals because they did not meet the requirements established by the Ayuso Government.
Since that moment, hundreds of families have filed complaints for reckless homicide, prevarication or denial of the duty to provide assistance in investigative courts in Madrid. Some cases are still alive and waiting, while others have been referred to the Constitutional Court. But the vast majority have been archived with the approval of the Prosecutor’s Office. The most common reason for closing cases has been that causality between what management did and the resident’s death cannot be established. Were they going to die anyway, as the president of Madrid blurted out in the Assembly? Surely not, or not all, of course, but justice has not found legal arguments to give that answer, or to elucidate how many would have been saved if the administration had acted differently. According to a detailed, although unofficial, report, thousands could have been saved.
“As we saw that this was the main obstacle to justice being done, we sought advice to be able to find a crime in which causality did not have to be proven,” says Carmen López, president of the Marea de Residencias platform. And they found a criminal type that fit part of what happened in those two terrible months. This is the “continued crime of denial of a benefit on discriminatory grounds, punished in article 511 of the Penal Code,” as the complaint, filed in October, explains. It has associated prison sentences of six months to two years and a fine of 12 to 24 months and disqualification for those who deny a public service for reasons, among others, “of the illness they suffer from or their disability.”
The complaint is against senior officials of the Ayuso Government responsible for health management, the external advisor hired by Ayuso, Antonio Burgueño (author of the ill-fated plan against the pandemic), and the hospital liaison geriatricians, who are the ones who applied the protocols. and whether or not they allowed the transfer of the elder.
From that moment on, Marea wrote to its database of relatives and offered them to be part of a collective complaint, both in the case in which the resident had died or if he had not died. They would have to prove that they had been discriminated against for the mere fact of living in a nursing home or for having some cognitive or physical limitation. Together with the Truth and Justice 7291 platform, they managed to unite 109 families seeking reparation for the death or neglect of 115 elderly people. Some of them did not even have any previous illness and yet they were not referred to hospitals. Meanwhile, the elderly who lived at home, whether or not they had dependency or illness, were able to go to hospitals during the worst of the pandemic, as well as those who had private health insurance.
The extensive complaint includes all these cases in detail, which paint a bleak and similar scenario in the 72 residences mentioned: the staff was overwhelmed, many were on sick leave, sometimes there were not even masks, there was no doctor at night, the elderly They worsened dramatically, relatives received little or no information, they were given paracetamol or antibiotics, referrals to the hospital were stopped if the patient did not meet certain requirements…
Nor were they given other alternatives for their treatment, such as referring them to the Ifema hospital macroproject, to medicalized hotels, nor were they allowed to go to health centers. Nor were more than a hundred doctors or health workers sent to them for a population of 44,000 people. All this despite the fact that the first epidemiologist who visited a residence during a pandemic warned of what was coming and proposed several measures to prevent the unassisted death of thousands of elderly people.
The double standard for those who lived in residences during the pandemic is clear, for example, in one of the testimonies collected in the complaint: “X died on April 3. He suffered from a respiratory infection and, days before the pandemic, he was referred to the Sureste Hospital, recovered and returned to the residence. Already in March, with the same symptoms, the referral was denied. The doctor at the residence informed the family by telephone on several occasions that in his opinion he required hospital care but that the Geriatrics department told him that he was not a candidate for a bed, nor an ICU, nor a respirator. The same for another resident: “On the 14th they told the family that they had a urine infection. On day 15 they indicate that he has worsened, he has fever, cough, runny nose and saturation at 88%. On the 23rd they indicate that he had a desaturation of 82 and as best they could they overcame it. On the 24th they indicated that there had been another very important desaturation and that they were going to call the hospital and ask for an ambulance. The hospital refuses admission. He dies the next day.”
The Madrid Prosecutor’s Office received the complaint in October, opened the file on November 6 and distributed the cases, as confirmed by sources from the department itself, who highlight that there was also a prior meeting with the relatives. This week they have called some to testify, who have come as witnesses to provide information or documentation about what happened to their loved ones. “The crimes will expire in March of this year,” says Judge José Antonio Martín Pallín, promoter of the Citizen Commission for the Truth. “Now we will have to see if the fact that the investigation has begun paralyzes those deadlines.”
“They didn’t take my aunt to the hospital”
One of the people who came to testify as a witness this Thursday is Yedra, a civil servant who lost her aunt in the Los Nogales residence, in the Pacífico neighborhood of the capital. “When I came to testify, they told me to tell what I had experienced and how I had experienced it.” And it seems like a horror: “My aunt was 90 years old, but she was in perfect health, she only had a limp because she had suffered polio when she was young. I went to see her every week and we played Parcheesi.”
At first they told her that she was fine, that she had a few tenths, that she had lost her appetite, “but when I talked to her on the phone I saw her dejected, she was such a happy woman, that when I went to see her before the pandemic she welcomed me. coming out with open arms.” In the last video call “he had a mask under his chin. I told her ‘hold on, aunt, we have to play Parcheesi!’, but I saw her looking very bad,” she says with a broken voice. I couldn’t stand it, because in addition there were no facilities in the residence for serious cases. “Two days later they told me that she had died and when I asked indignantly why they had not taken her to the hospital they told me that because they had a paper from the Community of Madrid that indicated so. A piece of paper, I remember it perfectly, and I told the Prosecutor’s Office that way on Thursday.”
Isabel testified this Friday about the death of her mother, who had Alzheimer’s, at the Gran Residencia, in Madrid. “At least they are listening to us,” he says with relief. He told the prosecutor that those days they told him that his mother was fine, but he could not talk to her. Finally, her family found a solution: “As my daughter is a nursing assistant, she asked for a job there and joined the residence on April 6.” Thanks to that, Isabel’s mother was able to die accompanied by someone from her family: her granddaughter, who was told by her colleagues to come up to see her because she was in the last minutes of life. “I, after all, have been lucky, because my mother died with someone in her family.”
When the statements are over and the Prosecutor’s Office assesses what happened, it will be known if the case is transferred to an investigative court if signs of a crime have been seen or if the investigation is closed, while the wounds of thousands of families remain open. The investigation commission in the Madrid Assembly was closed thanks to the absolute majority of the PP, there has been no act of redress, explanation, meeting and no institution has apologized for the abandonment suffered by 44,000 elderly people in residences without medicalization despite what fiance.
“No one deserves that inhuman end, that discrimination, and what hurts my soul is that to many people in Madrid this is foreign to them, they don’t care,” laments Yedra. She, like the other 108 families, is clear: they have to continue until the end: “Even if they are dead, they need justice to be done.”
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