How a Spanish city survives quarantine
Until March 8, life went on normally in Madrid. Some voices warned of the coronavirus, but the media said that everything was under control. In fact, at work we made jokes about it. But even though the media gave a sense of normalcy, the hospitals were starting to see more patients. On March 9, there were a thousand cases detected all over Spain and suddenly the Community of Madrid, which as an autonomous community can take some measures independently of the state, announced the closure of schools, institutes and universities.
In the office, there was talk of everything except work: Our boss has a 10year-old son who now had to stay at home. The father of one of my coworkers, a doctor, told us what we still couldn’t believe: They are going to confine us. A couple of days later the airports were closed and travel was forbidden.
My neighbor Clara is 24 years old and works as a nurse at one of the main hospitals in Madrid. While we were organizing ourselves for teleworking, I sent her a message to find out if what the media was saying was true, because we didn’t believe it. But she texted me back and confirmed. “Things are bad, bad, bad. Please stay at home,” she said.
In Spain, health care is public, so all citizens have the right to be treated in a hospital, but Clara told me that there were not enough materials, not enough beds, not enough tests, not enough ventilators for everyone and, above all, not enough staff. So on March 14 we began to applaud from the balconies, to thank Clara and all the health workers who were giving their lives for us.
Less than a week later, the death toll was over a thousand. The press criticized the fact that triage medicine was being applied, the kind that prioritizes those who have the greatest chance of surviving, something that my friend Clara also confirmed in her messages: “They are already deciding who will go down to the ICU, who will not go down to the ICU, they have to decide who will be put on a respirator. And it’s horrible because people are dying alone.”
My cousin’s grandmother was someone who died of coronavirus alone in the hospital. Her family could not say goodbye to her, and the next thing they received was an urn with her ashes. Meanwhile, my cousin, who is also a nurse, was going to work wrapped in garbage bags because the medical gowns were gone and she had nothing else to protect herself with while she was drawing blood from possibly infected people.
While these horrors were happening in hospitals around the country, so were stories about people breaking quarantine in the most Spanish ways possible. In Majorca, a man disguised himself as a sergeant of the army to break the confinement and was arrested by the police; in Barcelona eight people were arrested for having an orgy in a flat; and in Madrid the vice president of the government went repeatedly to the parliament without respecting the quarantine, although his wife had tested positive for COVID-19. The icing on the cake was when the government bought 640,000 rapid coronavirus tests from China that were defective and had to be returned.
Finally, the isolation slowed down the contagion curve, and on April 28 the government presented a deconfinement plan for Spain. On May 2 we were able to go out for a walk, divided into time slots; those under 70 years of age between 6 and 10 a.m. and between 8 and 11 p.m. Those over 70 years of age and dependent persons could walk between 10 a.m. and noon and between 7 and 8 p.m.
Even so, the shock and fear of an upsurge is still there. Clara told me a few days ago, “It will be hard for me to stop being anxious.” This crisis has caught each of us in moments and situations that are divided like our walks in phase zero: in age groups. My age group, the late millenials (1992), has not been so affected by the health crisis, but we will be hit by a second crisis, the economic one.
Thanks to the fact that my company is a communication startup, we have moved fast, and we have been able to provide clients support, even if it was at the cost of not sleeping many nights to get projects done. But I also have many friends in my industry who have lost their jobs. Of the 900,000 jobs lost in March, 53 percent have affected young people under 35.
This Monday, with my window open, I listened to Clara, who besides being a nurse also plays the piano. She played the song “Resistiré,” an old song based on the chords of “I will survive,” that says “I will resist,” in Spanish and has become fashionable again these days. The future is not very hopeful but “we will resist.” We will have no choice.