Two questions unleashed a storm this Thursday in the Madrid Assembly.
“Didn't they do anything wrong?
"So they would do it again?" Manuela Bergerot, the spokesperson for Más Madrid, asks the Government during the control session, unleashed in her complaint of the 7,291 deaths of elderly people who were not transferred from their residences to hospitals in what worst of the coronavirus pandemic;
She is fired up with her criticism of the president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and she is ready to anticipate the response that she expects from her, because she thinks that the regional leader will tell her that everything was done well.
But she is wrong.
Because Ayuso complies with his forecast, but then he goes one step further and, while the chamber is filled with shouts, protests, stamping of feet and blows against the seats, he blurts out: “When an elderly person was seriously ill, with the covid, with the "The viral load that existed then was not saved anywhere."
And the anger multiplies, because in this way the PP indirectly admits the application of protocols that it denied having activated for a long time.
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The parenthesis theory
It is a day like no other in the regional Assembly.
As EL PAÍS reported, the day begins with the resignation of Ana Cuartero (Vox) as president of the hiring oversight commission, in protest at the obstacles that the absolute majority of the PP places on her supervisory work.
He continues with agitated conversations in the hallways about the government fiasco of the day before, signing and dismissing former Civil Guard general Arturo Espejo in just a few hours on Wednesday due to his relationship with the
Zabalza case
.
And it reaches its boiling point when, in plenary session, the Government is disgraced for refusing to make public the police inspection reports of the residences during the pandemic, or for it to celebrate in a big way that a court has filed, protecting its work. , one of the open causes of deaths in these institutions.
"Mrs. Ayuso, your protocols condemned thousands of elderly people to die without going to a hospital, they died by drowning, without pain medication," describes Bergerot, while the deputies begin to agitate on the PP bench.
“That's why you hide the minutes,” he adds as he shows and reads one.
“They have the nerve to boast that a court in Parla has closed their case, when they have more than 150 open complaints,” he continues.
“Didn't they do anything wrong?
“So they would do it again?” he asks.
And he anticipates the answer: “Don't tell me.
Tell it to the relatives of the 7,291 seniors who died without going to the hospital because of their protocols.
"Sooner rather than later there will be justice."
The data of 7,291 deaths that Bergerot refers to this Thursday comes from the newspaper
InfoLibre
,
which analyzed deaths from any cause within Madrid residences in the months of March and April 2020. It was in those months when the protocols wreaked greatest havoc.
This medium published data on referrals to hospitals from the Ministry of Health that show that exclusions were more intense between March 9 and April 5 and, with special intensity, between March 16 and 29.
As hospitals freed up beds, geriatricians stopped acting as filters and sick residents were readmitted, although this situation varied from one hospital to another.
According to an analysis published by EL PAÍS, in the entire first wave (from March to June 2020) 11,389 elderly people living in nursing homes died, of which 8,338 (73%) were not transferred to a hospital.
While Bergerot speaks, Ayuso listens to her, takes notes, and shares them with her second in command, counselor Miguel Ángel García.
When his turn to respond comes, he fires with everything, because he decided a long time ago that in this matter the best defense is a good attack.
And that is why he boasts that Madrid was the first region to close educational centers to stop the spread of the virus, despite the fact that the Basque Country was actually ahead of it.
And that is why he blames the Government of Pedro Sánchez for having done “nothing.”
And that is why he slips that in Aragon, then governed by the PSOE, there were also triage protocols that prevented the transfer of residents to hospitals so that they would not collapse due to an excess influx of patients.
“The management carried out by the Government of the Community put us first with a large majority and then with an absolute majority, and they cannot stand it,” argues Ayuso, as if the ballot boxes absolved any management problem, all the sins and errors.
And then, he says: “Many older people, when they went to hospitals, also died.
Because when an elderly person is seriously ill, with the covid, with the viral load that there was then, they were not saved anywhere, and you, without humanity, deny the truth.”
It would not have mattered, the president of the Community of Madrid says.
The impact of those words almost extinguishes the anger that until then surrounded her intervention.
We then begin to hear the admonition of the president of the Assembly, Enrique Ossorio (PP), to the Más Madrid bench.
He asks MPs from the main opposition party to stop interrupting.
He purrs to them that they have good speakers, asking them to use the word accordingly, but when it is his turn.
But it doesn't matter, because the memory of the deceased elderly has left the deputies exhausted, as if they were weighing in their heads what 7,291 deaths mean, one by one, alone, almost all of them, in a residence.
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