Ravaged by deaths
gang known as “Los Miami”, according media reports in Spain.
Spain’s health service is straining to cope so retired doctors, students and first aid volunteers are being drafted into hospitals to help.
Ninety hotels in Madrid are being converted to hold patients as hospital wards overflow.
Field hospitals are being set up in Madrid and Barcelona at major exhibition centres.
Natalia Silva, a doctor at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona, told The Telegraph: “It is really tough. Yesterday there was a queue to deal with seriously ill patients. Those who don’t make it die apart from their families.”
Despite all, there are signs the coronavirus crisis has brought together a gregarious society which normally lives outside through its bars, restaurants and on the beach.
Since the lockdown, Spaniards emerge every night on to the balconies of their flats to clap doctors and nurses.
Some have taken to dancing flamenco or running their own mini-discos for the entertainment of neighbours. Father’s Day was celebrated in Spain on Thursday and children were encouraged to sing to Don Pepito, a traditional song from the balconies.
Panic buying set in at supermarkets in Madrid last week but now orderly queues are the norm with shoppers respecting a one-metre gap between customers. Elderly people are allowed in first.
Most obey the lockdown regulations but a small stir crazy minority have flouted the rules by taking toy dogs or tortoises out on the end of a string.
There were signs that in some areas, fear of catching the virus was making people suspicious of foreigners.
When Andrés Elena Domínguez, 72, died from coronavirus last weekend in Candelario, a tiny village of less than 1,000 inhabitants near Salamanca, western Spain, his family claimed they had been shunned by neighbours.
Residents became scared and burst the wheels of 11 cars owned by people who were not locals.
One of the victims was a British couple who live in Almuñécar near Granada, southern Spain, who had been on a short holiday.
“The British couple came for a weekend away but just as the lockdown started last weekend, people started to get scared of strangers and they attacked 11 cars.
“These were not just vandals,” said Ester Fernández, a journalist with La Gaceta newspaper.