When a global pandemic forces home confinement, one imagines the rulers meeting with the most prepared experts in the country to find the best solutions.
Or he fantasizes about the possibility that political interests are parked to relieve the population.
None of this happens in the documentary
Broken Health
, recently included in the Netflix catalog, about the management of the covid pandemic in Catalonia.
The program poses the management of covid as a communication crisis.
It seems the pandemic of overacting.
Vergés appears in much of the documentary surrounded by a communication team with a political profile.
"We do not hide any dead," she vehemently reminds her director of communication, Marc Bataller, before a public appearance.
We
are the Generalitat and the
others
are supposed to be Madrid.
The viewer quickly understands that the pandemic also became a battlefield where the upper echelons tried to wear down their political rivals and hang "medals", as claimed by the one who would shortly after be Secretary of Health of the Generalitat, Marc Ramentol, in a Esquerra Republicana strategy meeting.
At the same meeting, Ramentol asks those present if the “goal” should be “for the group of experts [against covid] to work well and at ease, or to gain political leadership” in the deconfinement phase.
The response from Lluís Corral, then Vergés' chief of staff, is quick: "Man, the first objective is to gain political leadership, but if possible without forgetting the other".
The plan, those present at the meeting insist, is for the population to “see” that Vergés is leading the deconfinement strategy.
Broken Health
, 68 minutes long, also reflects the tension and lack of coordination between ERC and Junts as a result of the election of the epidemiologist Oriol Mitjà as advisor to the President of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, for the deconfinement phase.
"We didn't know anything about the signing of Mitjà," laments Bataller.
"We already had a team working on it."
The same director of communication admits that the plan of the Generalitat, without powers to do so, to allow the staggered exit of children to the street in April, was a "measure of pressure" on the central government.
The relationship between the Department of Health and the Ministry of Health does not seem particularly fluid, especially when the Generalitat proposes in mid-April a change in the model in the count of the deceased to further refine the impact of the virus.
The decision does not like in Madrid:
The distance that the political and technical actions generate in the viewer contrasts with the proximity of each of the health workers that appear, carefully chosen.
A professional from a residence recounts the harshness of the infections in the first days: “The elderly fell like dominoes.
We did not have respirators for everyone, and he took the oxygen from the one that saturated the best to put it on the one that saturated the worst.
Another worker at the Hospital del Mar explains that one day she recognized a former serious COVID patient on the street playing with her son.
“Then you see that it was all worth it,” she says.
She talks about the lack of equipment, the shortage of personnel, overtime, fear and endless fatigue at bedside,
issues that the film hardly controls beyond including some demands of the workers to Vergés.
The counselor's answers sometimes seem timid: “I wouldn't have thought that in the midst of the crisis I would have to assume the part of the residences.
I don't know what I can do [for you]”, she answers to a team of professionals from a social health center.
The co-director of the documentary, Nick Bolger, explains to EL PAÍS that he intended to portray Vergés from an "intimate" perspective and "provide a vision from the point of view of women to give a somewhat different perspective."
He started the project when he saw from home the counselor's grief after confining Igualada, her city, and separating from her family.
"I found it interesting to portray a young woman who has to make such a tough decision."
Bolger says that Vergés reminds her of her mother, Irene Bolger, a “single woman and a trade unionist” who led a major nurses' strike in Australia.
"Inspired me".
The director's gaze, in any case, indirectly reopens the debate on models of political leadership in crisis situations, although it does not include external contributions that evaluate Vergés' management.
Only the counselor expresses her experience.
“They told me everything [to get excited], but we are all people.
You can feel things even though the decisions are tough.”
The director admits that he preferred to focus on the day-to-day with his closest team than in the work meetings (“it was not so easy to access them”, he justifies) and that he did not intend to supervise his task at the head of Health but to “bring it closer” to the viewer.
“Criticism has already come from the media.
I didn't want to do the same."
She got it.
You can follow EL PAÍS Catalunya on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter