Healthcare workers in country account for more than 13% of the country’s Covid-19 cases

Doctors in Spain have complained of a lack of basic protective equipment as 514 people died with the virus in the country in a single day and the latest figures revealed that Spanish healthcare workers account for more than 13% of the country’s 39,673 cases.

Spain, the second-most affected country in Europe after Italy, has been in lockdown since 14 March, but is struggling to slow the spread of the disease, which has so far claimed 2,696 lives.

The Madrid region has logged 12,352 cases – almost a third of the national total – and 1,535 deaths.

With hospitals, funeral homes and crematoriums in and around the capital struggling to keep pace, an ice rink in the city has been pressed into service as a makeshift morgue and Madrid’s cavernous Ifema conference centre has been converted into a field hospital with capacity for 5,500 beds.

Spanish minister says older people found 'dead and abandoned' Read more

As the number of infected health workers rises, some health professionals say they still lack the necessary material to keep them safe as they struggle to keep the virus from collapsing the system.

On Tuesday morning, the government confirmed that 5,400 health workers had contracted the virus. Almost 650,000 rapid-testing kits are being distributed to frontline medical staff as well as residential homes and the most affected regions.

Angela Hernández Puente, a surgeon and deputy general secretary of Madrid’s Amtys medical association, said political rhetoric could not be used to hide missteps and mistakes in Spain’s response to the virus.

“The excuse that ‘we’re doing everything we can,’ or ‘we’re on a war footing’ can’t be allowed to cover up the management deficits we’re seeing at both a regional and a national level,” she said. “Things can – and must be – done better. This isn’t a war: it’s a very badly managed epidemic.

Hernández said primary health care facilities and staff in the capital were overloaded and suffering from a significant lack of personal protective equipment, including masks, visors and impermeable gowns.

“When it comes to more serious cases and people in hospital beds, Madrid is swamped because of the lack of effective co-ordination between different hospitals,” she said. “Some hospitals have been jammed up since the middle of last week and others reached full capacity on Sunday or Monday.”

Widely shared videos on social media have suggested that ICUs in Madrid are totally overwhelmed and that younger people are being given priority over older people because of a shortage of ventilators.

But Hernández said that while triage at the units was intensifying, there was still capacity. She also pointed out that intensive care units (ICUs) routinely make decisions about the best use of equipment when it came to a patient’s chances.

“Intensive care units always triage – they’re always a limited resource so you look at who they’re going to benefit the most,” she said. “But it’s true that the health system is totally overloaded and that those decisions are being taken on a stricter basis.”

Hernández said that colleagues in the health service were “giving it everything they’ve got – and sometimes putting their lives in jeopardy”. She said it did not seem that lessons had been learned from Italy, where the virus also took a serious toll on health workers, especially older ones.

Fernando Simón, the head of Spain’s centre for health emergencies, said the country was in a “tough week” but added it should soon become clear whether the government’s drastic confinement measures had succeeded in arresting the number of new cases.

“This is the week in which we’re all expecting to see what we’ve managed to achieve with these important and very aggressive measures that we’ve put in place in Spain,” he said. “We’re waiting to see whether we’ve already reached the peak and will see a decrease in the number of cases.”

Simón said that even if a peak was soon reached, there would still be a lag because of the delay between people becoming infected with the virus and being formally diagnosed and added to the case count.

He also said health workers would be dealing with an intense crisis long after the point when the number of new cases started to dwindle. “It takes a while before people who show symptoms end up in hospital or before they are then treated in intensive care units,” he said.

“That means that the pressure on hospitals and on ICUs will last beyond the moment when transmission is brought under control. We need to focus on that – and health workers will be under pressure for a lot longer than the rest of the population.”

The scale of the pandemic emerged on Monday when Spain’s defence minister revealed that soldiers drafted in to help tackle the outbreak by disinfecting residential homes had found a number of elderly people abandoned and dead in their beds.

On Tuesday, armed guards stood outside the Palacio de Hielo ice rink in north-east Madrid as it was converted into a morgue under “temporary and extraordinary measures” agreed between the local and regional governments.

At the Ifema conference centre – the venue for last year’s Cop climate summit – workers continued their efforts to turn its giant exhibition halls into wards with thousands of widely spaced beds.

José Luis Pérez Olmo, the head of nursing at the Madrid regional government’s emergency medical service, said the “ad hoc hospital” would also include ICUs with at least 50 beds.

“Since last Friday, we’ve been working incredibly hard 24 hours a day so that this field hospital – which will be one of Spain’s biggest hospitals – will be able to support other hospitals in Madrid,” he said.