Verviers, the black hole of the coronavirus in Europe

A woman performs a PCR test in a tent in Verviers. © Delmi Alvarez

In the pharmacy on the corner they speak French, English, Turkish, Arabic, Berber and define the population of the neighborhood: "impoverished."

They say that they no longer have oxygen supplies, that the elderly have washed away with them and they give some explanation of the terrible figures: “People ignore the distancing measures.

And there are many young people ”.

Outside, a ruined building with shattered windows is visible next to a bare lot.

After a sign that warns pedestrians "The use of a mask is mandatory", a bustling street is born that seems to be taken from the other shore of the Mediterranean, but passed through water.

Oriental-style shops merge with old

cracked

.

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A little further on, a boy rolls a marijuana bud between his fingers.

"Do you like sex?" He asks sarcastically when the journalist approaches.

He and his friends will be around 18 or 20 years old.

Only one wears a mask and it is hooked under the chin.

These wet, stray cats, covered in caps and hoods, keep on messing about.

"Are you asking about covid 18 or 19?"

One records the scene with the mobile, with his face in the foreground, to upload it to social networks.

Another threatens to take the photographer's camera.

“Here we are not afraid of the virus.

Only to God ”, one ditch while raising the right index finger to the mercury sky, with that gesture that sums up that there is no more God than Allah.

Welcome to Verviers, the European epicenter of the coronavirus.

Belgium, with an accumulated rate of 1,600 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, this week became the country most affected by covid in the European Union.

Within the country, the most affected area is the French-speaking region of Wallonia.

In its interior, the province of Liège is the hardest hit.

And at the eastern end of the province, just a step away from Germany, this Central European city of about 55,000 inhabitants and a glorious industrial past, today consumed by relocation, immigration and poverty, leads the very dark national statistics.

In Verviers, there are around 3,900 positives per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the public agency Sciensano, and hospitals, full and with alarming rates of admission, have begun to evacuate patients to Germany.

Verviers is the most touched of the great cities of the country.

"The situation is terrible," says Stéphane Lefebvre, director of the Verviers Hospital, as he enters the tent for COVID patients that are about to conclude, a kind of annex field hospital with which they intend to withstand the new onslaught.

The hospital has been receiving patients in waves in recent days and adds 153 admitted with coronavirus.

"Double that of the first wave," says Lefebvre.

"And the problem is going to be the next two weeks."

In the auxiliary tent, a bustle of workers hook oxygen tubes between the beds and the nurses place rows and rows of medicines on the shelves.

The computers, new, still have the protective plastic of the screens.

They have taken a week to get it up.

It has capacity for 34 covid patients with mild illness and is intended to be an outlet for a center on the verge of collapse: 15% of its medical staff are on sick leave due to covid;

most urgent services have been suspended;

There are already 17 patients in intensive care (they have 22 spaces available, all occupied);

and a couple of days ago a first ICU patient was transferred to Germany, in order to alleviate the situation.

In the coming days, according to Lefebvre, Germany will host up to 15 patients from the area.

Although the figures are already resounding and those infected in Belgium this week exceeded those of the first wave, the director of the Hosptial still has hope: mortality, he says, still remains below.

But it scares him because the numbers keep climbing and his patients have an average age of 65, the same as in the spring.

“We are helpless.

With more cases and less staff ”.

They still have enough budget to hire more nurses, but they can't find them.

Lefebvre cannot fully explain the extraordinary incidence in Verviers.

In part, he says, it is due to the students: many live from Monday to Friday in the university towns of Liège or Leuven, where they share a flat;

on the weekend they return home, perhaps without symptoms, but infected, and spread the virus.

In the City Council, the Councilor for Health, Sophie Lambert, thinks that the student issue "is not decisive."

It provides another explanation: population density.

"Here we live on top of each other."

In Verviers, which was a wool empire in the golden years of the industrial revolution, the manor houses have been divided into countless apartments for increasingly lower middle-class families: where one lived, four or five now live.

To that, the councilor adds the more than 100 nationalities that live in the city.

"There is a very important and impoverished population of foreign origin," says socialist politics.

Foreigners account for 12%, a figure similar to that of the rest of the country, although it grows when Belgians of foreign origin are taken into account.

And the unemployment rate exceeds 20%, more than double that in Belgium.

The communication of what here they call

(mask, social distance ...) is, according to Lambert, complicated in certain neighborhoods.

From Madrid to New York, passing through Verviers, social inequality is a determining factor in the health gap.

Olivier Gillis, director of the Brussels Health and Social Observatory, considers, for example, "population density and precariousness" as two of the determining factors in this pandemic.

In Verviers, according to the City Council, the fluid cross-border movement with the Netherlands and Germany, both a stone's throw away, and the lack of harmonization of measures in the country, dictated by a complex labyrinth of administrations at different levels, have also been key.

With the intention of putting order and reversing a terrifying and unstoppable spiral, the Prime Minister, Alexander de Croo, appeared this Friday to further toughen the confinement by decreeing compulsory teleworking throughout Belgium, the closure of non-essential shops, the closure of the schools and the reduction of social contact to a single person outside the home per week.

"We are tired.

We suffocate ”.

In an industrial estate on the outskirts of Verviers, the City Council has set up a tent that cars and their occupants can get to for free PCR testing without getting out of the vehicle.

Last Monday they carried out about 550 tests, say the toilets in PPE suits.

This Friday at noon they have already 141. The average is around 400 daily.

And now, to try to buy some time from the collapse in the laboratories, they only allow those who come with symptoms, such as this Kurdish woman, who has arrived accompanied by her daughter: the mother, with an exhausted gesture, feels fatigue and inability to breathe;

the daughter does not notice anything except that she has lost her sense of smell.

The youngest translates to her mother: they arrived in Belgium in 2012 and settled in Verviers;

the father works as a waiter in a cafe.

A man sticks a stick through each one's nose.

They contract their faces.

They put the mask back on.

And the women walk away from there.

Meanwhile, half an hour from there, a demonstration begins in Liège, the capital of the most affected province of Belgium, at the gates of one of its large health centers, the Montlégia clinic.

Rita Melissa, a 29-year-old nurse who has come with a black bracelet that reads "Take care of those who take care of you", speaks of 35% of nurses absent due to illness in her hospital, where there are already a hundred patients in the ICU.

"It is a disaster".

The protesters demand that the government fulfill the promises of salary increases and improvement of conditions that came after the first wave.

But amid the blow of the second, there is hardly any hope.

How are they in the mood?

"Evil.

We are tired.

We suffocate, ”says Melissa.

Information about the coronavirus

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- Guide to action against the disease