Spain’s hospital staff improvise in makeshift ICU
BADALONA, SPAIN
The tension is palpable. There is no non-essential talking. An orchestra of medical monitors marks the tempo with an endless series of soft, distinct beeps.
Never have so many people been inside the library of the Germans Trias i Pujol hospital in northeastern Spain. But the health care workers in improvised protective gear aren’t consulting medical books. Instead, they’re treating patients in critical condition suffering from pneumonia caused by the coronavirus.
From the outside, this makeshift intensive-care unit in Badalona, near Barcelona, looks nothing like a library. The bookshelves have been removed to make room for up to 20 hospital beds, breathing machines and an array of medical equipment after the longstanding ICU and other areas of the hospital flooded with COVID-19 patients.
With the scarcity of fullbody protective suits across
Spain, doctors and nurses are employing what they can find, reusing masks, layering oversized surgical gowns with plastic aprons and running through an infinite number of latex gloves.
Like scuba divers, they apply a small dose of detergent to their goggles just before stepping into the sweltering room in the hopes of mitigating the inevitable fogging of their eye protection caused by their own breathing. They’ll be at it for hours, racing from patient to patient, sweating under the layers.
Most patients are intubated and hooked up to ventilators; about half have been flipped onto their stomachs to ease pressure on their lungs and help their breathing. Nurses acknowledge this is not a hopeful sign.
As Spain sees the rate of infections slowly stabilize, it continues logging a daily record number of deaths — Thursday set a new mark, with 950 deaths in 24 hours. More than 10,000 people have died in Spain thus far.