- Title: Nursing homes in Spain a vector for deadly coronavirus
- Date: 23rd March 2020
- Summary: MADRID, SPAIN (MARCH 23, 2020) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF SOLDIERS OF THE MILITARY EMERGENCY (UME) SERVICE GEARING UP TO DISINFECT A NURSING HOME (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) LIEUTENANT, FERNANDO SANZ, SAYING: "For example a whole section, around 35 people, came to this nursing home with pumpers, personal protection gear to disinfect." VARIOUS OF SOLDIERS GEARED UP ENTERING THE NURSING HOME MILITARY CAR GETTING INTO NURSING HOME SOLDIERS OUTSIDE NURSING HOME MILITARY TRUCKS LEAVING NURSING HOME VARIOUS OF MADRID PUBLIC SERVANTS CLEANING AND DISINFECTING THE STREET EMPTY ROAD / NURSING HOME
- Embargoed: 6th April 2020 18:04
- Keywords: COVID-19 coronavirus military disinfecting nursing homes
- Location: MADRID, SPAIN
- City: MADRID, SPAIN
- Country: Spain
- Topics: Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA001C69XVT3
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Emergency military soldiers disinfected on Monday (March 23) several nursing homes across Spain.
The coronavirus has wrought dramatic transformations of nursing homes in the country, turning dozens of its 5,500 homes into plague houses and propelling their ill-equipped staff onto the frontlines of an accelerating pandemic.
Spain's overwhelmed hospitals have asked homes for the elderly to care for seriously ill residents, but the homes lack ventilators and must compete with hospitals for scarce medical equipment and virus testing kits, industry representatives say.
On Monday, the defense ministry announced that members of the military emergency unit (UME) have found dead people in some nursing homes during their disinfecting works.
In some homes, staff said they were rationing masks or making their own out of cloth, or wearing disposable gowns for multiple shifts. Some workers said they were too scared to come to work, while others had fallen sick, leaving homes short-staffed during a time of unprecedented need.
All of Spain's care homes - two-thirds of which are privately run - are now locked down, their almost 400,000 elderly residents cut off from their families.
Retirement homes will be one of the priorities of a campaign of increased testing, health emergency chief Fernando Simon said on Sunday (March 22), to ensure people with the virus don't come into the homes and that infected residents could be separated from the rest "before we see serious situations as we've seen in some of these homes."
The number of cases of coronavirus in Spain rose to 33,089 on Monday up from 28,572 cases on Sunday in Spain, the hardest-hit European country after Italy.
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