Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.   

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*

The Bloody Virus 

• This map tells you where it's least risky to travel to in Spain, though 3 of Galicia's 4 provinces seem to be data-deficient. You might be able to get The Local's comments in English here.
• Hydroxychloroquine: What a shock! Trump called it wrong.
• The USA has now risen above Ireland for deaths/m and will soon overtake France and, very probably, Sweden in due course.
• See below for a nice, though rather shocking, article on 'Spain's Unsung Heroes' below.

Life in Spain

• Can anyone really be surprised at the finding that, for native English speakers, the best new language to learn is Spanish? At least until Mandarin becomes essential/obligatory . . .
• Sad news for at least some Brits/foreigners. I'd never heard of the service, never mind used it. But I guess the ads only appear Down South, in the ghettoes. [Attempted irony emoji]

• Here's an interesting blog on what is Spain's - and Europe's - least populated area. Which is written about - and beautifully snapped - by this talented lady. Coincidentally, I'm planning a road trip to Teruel and beyond later this year, things permitting.
• Reader María has raised the issue of what constitutes the middle class in Spain. I suspect that, as in the USA, this is an income-related question. Whereas it's far less 'simple' in the UK. So, what is the upper income level here in Spain? €80,000 a year? At least this would fit with María's contention that anyone earning €100,000 can't be considered even 'upper middle class', to use a British term. 'Uppermost' even.
• Here's María's Day 31 of her Come-back Chronicle - Gone phishing.

The USA

• "He fell harder than he was pushed". How much more evidence is needed of the appalling personality of the current president of this great(?) country? Not to mention his mindset/sanity.

Finally . . .

• Reader María has corrected my mis-recollection of where the alleged crocodile was seen, not in Sevilla but close to Valladolid. See this article, where that city is said to lie in 'centre-northern' Spain, not in the 'North West'. To which I objected a few days ago.,
• I had a packet of books sent to me from the Netherlands in late February, just before I was sue to leave Pontevedra for 3 weeks. I failed to get Correos here to retain them during my absence for 3 weeks  and I was also unsuccessful in getting my neighbour to pick them up, as some bureaucratic requirement couldn't be met. So, after 2 weeks here, the books were sent back to the Netherlands, whence they were re-sent to me on 27 May. According to the tracking information, they're still there, though they were 'sorted' on 29 May. I'm beginning to fear I'll never see these accursed books. 

 THE ARTICLE

Spain’s unsung heroes on the coronavirus front line: Isambard Wilkinson , The Times.

The hardest task for Lieutenant Rafael Cisneros and his unit during the worst days of the coronavirus in Spain was not the handling of dead bodies to be transferred from hospitals to morgues. It was entering care homes for the elderly. “You’d see people fighting for their lives,” he said. “You’d see the nearness of death.”

Lieutenant Cisneros and his team of military emergency specialists are trained to deal with biological and chemical incidents. They were not prepared for the chaos and distressing scenes in care homes as they were plunged on to the front line of Spain’s coronavirus disaster. They encountered dead bodies locked in rooms, the rapid spread of the disease as infectious residents mixed with healthy ones, and staff in despair. Shrouded in protective suits, goggles and face-masks they were met with looks of horror, confusion and fear caused by their presence.

They disinfected the homes, imposed order and tried to keep residents calm in a mission that became the toughest part of a huge national military response to the pandemic, which had a lasting emotional impact on the units.

Yet the grim work of the armed forces has largely gone unrecognised. Their past is too fresh for public acclamation.

Care homes were the epicentre of the outbreak in Spain, one of the worst hit countries where the pandemic officially claimed over 27,000 lives. The figure does not include an estimated 19,000 people who died with symptoms in care homes. Some 48,000 more people have died in 2020 than during the same period in 2019, according to the national statistics institute.

Some care homes in Madrid had at least 40 deaths — a third of the residents in one institution — linked to Covid-19. Staff used dustbin bags as protection for lack of proper resources. The scene was repeated in other parts of Spain. In Catalonia there were reports of at least 57 deaths in one home, more than a third of the residents.

Lieutenant Cisneros is a member of the 3,500-strong Emergency Military Unit (UME), which is based at Torrejón airbase, just outside Madrid. It is known for its work in containing the damage from floods, forest fires and industrial accidents.

Speaking to The Times at the base, where fire engines and personnel clad in red protection suits were training to tackle the summer’s forest fires, he said the company he commands was among the first to go through care home doors. “In some cases we found dead people in their rooms,” he said. “In the worst cases everyone was in contact with each other and there were no barriers — it was just a matter of time before everyone got sick. The first impression is shocking for everyone but it’s our mission.”

Margarita Robles, the defence minister, made international headlines on March 23 when she said the military had found “elderly abandoned, if not dead, in their beds”. The discovery confirmed what some relatives of care home residents already knew. It also symbolised the scale of the tragedy and its toll on society’s most vulnerable people. The revelation had another effect: it highlighted the role that Spain’s armed forces were playing at the heart of the crisis.

Military units have conducted over 20,000 missions involving more than 180,000 personnel during the pandemic. Yet despite their initial visibility in the Spanish media — a photograph of two uniformed soldiers helping an elderly woman carrying her shopping attracted particular attention — the story of their contribution has largely gone untold.

The reason for this lies in Spain’s recent history and the military’s support for the dictatorship of General Franco until his death in 1975. Despite modernisation and reform since then, the old stigma has survived, even though opinion polls rank them among the country’s most trusted institutions.

Charles Powell, the director of the Elcano Royal Institute, a think tank in Madrid, believes the armed forces have emerged “strengthened in political and popular perception”. Much of this is due to their speed of response. On March 14, a little more than a week before the defence minister’s revelation, Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist prime minister, imposed one of Europe’s strictest lockdown, with nobody allowed to leave their homes other than for essential tasks.

However, Mr Sánchez’s government, the first run by a coalition in Spain’s modern democratic history, was initially slow to respond. It had been in office for only 15 days when the country recorded its first coronavirus case: a German tourist on holiday in the Canary Islands on January 31, the same day the World Health Organisation declared a global health emergency. Yet the government’s emergency health chief said he expected Spain to have, at most, only a few diagnosed cases. The military, however, were preparing. The UME’s intelligence gatherers had tracked the virus’s progress from China to Italy. In the unit’s command centre, where personnel sit in front of a wall of digital screens monitoring national emergency flash-points, Major Juan Martínez said: “In the weeks before the declaration of the state of emergency we watched the unprecedented acceleration of the threat and we began to plan.”

The defence ministry announced Operation Balmis on March 15. Named after Francisco de Balmis, who led an expedition to carry the smallpox vaccine to the United States from Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, it would be by far the largest military operation conducted since the transition to democracy after Franco’s death.

In the first two weeks of the crisis, the military’s operations across Spain took on a frantic tempo. The UME was the spearhead with navy, army and air force units in support. After patrols and logistics missions, they helped with food distribution and conducted a massive campaign of disinfections.

As well as hospitals, they decontaminated bus stations, ports, police stations, prisons, metro stations, buses, parks, lodgings for healthcare workers and courts. In a few months they would disinfect everywhere from Barcelona’s fish market to the national library in Madrid. But it quickly became apparent that the chief role of the armed forces would be disinfecting and reorganising care homes for the elderly. “We came across care homes where the problems were of such magnitude that the staff would have had difficulties to act even if they had known what to do,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Juan Esteban, the commander of the UME’s 1st battalion.

Captain Juan Meneses, a company commander with the Legion, an elite infantry unit based in Almeria in southeast Spain, encountered his toughest Covid-19 assignment on March 25, in a large care home in Albacete. His unit found that 60 to 70 people, a third of its elderly residents, were infected. His mission was to decontaminate the residence and separate the ill from the healthy. Captain Meneses said the anguish on the faces of residents and workers when the military arrived was one of the images that has haunted him. “It’s the anxiety of not knowing exactly what’s happening because of the virus, because they’ve had so many infections, if we’re going to be capable of solving the problems,” he said. “There are elderly people who don’t know what’s happening and you need to keep them calm and try to make sure they don’t worry. For me that was the most painful situation.”

Across Spain care homes called on the military. “We couldn’t cope,” Lieutenant-Colonel Esteban said. “We never stopped. The waiting list for care homes that needed help never ended as one after another called for our assistance.” Within two months the armed forces managed to assist 5,200 care homes.

While most of the military’s efforts were focused on elderly care homes, they were also instrumental in setting up field hospitals, including a 5,000-bed facility in Madrid at IFEMA, the capital’s conference centre. With hospitals overflowing with the dead and funeral workers overstretched, armed forces personnel also transferred bodies to a morgue set up at an ice rink in Madrid. “When we started taking on the management of the bodies, that was when all the missions happened at once — in hospitals, care homes, transferring bodies and patients — it was the start of the crest of the wave,” Lieutenant Cisneros said. Ambulance services were also overwhelmed and so the UME evolved methods of rigging up buses to transport patients who were moderately ill with the virus between hospitals and medicalised hotels.

The crisis peaked on April 2, with the daily reported death rate reaching 950. At that time Major María José Rodriguez, who ran a UME unit that normally tests for nuclear, biological or chemical contamination but had been adapted to carry out coronavirus tests on personnel, said she was working 14-hour days. “There was a great demand for speed as they needed to know quickly if they could be deployed,” she said.

Such was the engagement with the emergency, said Lieutenant-Colonel Leandro Caballero, the head of UME’s psychology unit, that many personnel had to be told to go home. At group psychotherapy sessions, personnel tasked to care homes discussed how they had been affected by the scenes they had witnessed. “It became clear that it had been more stressful for them to work with the living than the dead,” he said. “In some cases they identified with a patient or resident in a dramatic situation, thinking of their own relatives, their parents or grandparents.”

From mid-April, when the daily death toll started a downward trend, the pace of military operations slowed. Operation Balmis is expected to end when the state of emergency expires on June 21 and Spain edges towards leaving lockdown.

The weight of the military’s effort has been recognised by Spain’s health sector. “The work of the armed forces helped to reduce the impact of the disease in many areas, from prevention — by cleaning and disinfection — to healthcare in terms of setting up field hospitals, and to the ultimate consequences of the disease by supporting funeral services,” said Ignacio Rosell, professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Valladolid.

However, political appreciation remains muted because of their Francoist past. “Political leaders, socialists and conservatives, have never wanted to be tied to the armed forces because they perceive a popular rejection of them, an opposition to them,” Félix Arteaga, senior defence analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute, said. “So you very rarely see political leaders, even conservatives, visiting troops abroad.” When asked why the armed forces had not received more recognition, one army officer shrugged and replied: “If you were Spanish, you’d know.”

The military’s own assessment of its achievements is modest. “What we did was not technically difficult. In that sense it was easy,” Lieutenant-Colonel Esteban said. “The most important thing for me was that in a moment of general shock we gave an organised and immediate response. We didn’t wait for anyone to call us.”


* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

Note: This blog has long appeared on Blogger here: www.colindavies,blogspot.com   where there's a nice foto which EoS declines to include, even though it was taken by me.