Heartbreak among families of elderly people who died from covid without health insurance: “I don’t know who I buried, I didn’t see my father”

2023-10-20 06:36:36

“The last time I spoke with my father he told me: ‘Daughter, please, let’s see if you take me out of here, let me die. Take me out.’ I asked the management of the residence many times, but they always denied me Later, when he died, I begged to be allowed to see him. It never happened. I was only able to say goodbye to a closed box with his name written on a piece of paper. I don’t know who I buried. I never knew,” Puri recalls in a conversation with Público. Like her, thousands of Madrid families knew that those close to her who lived in senior centers were condemned to die without medical attention, with the helplessness of not being able to do anything.

In the toughest moments of the pandemic, the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso approved the so-called “protocols of shame”: documents that included a series of guidelines to exclude older people, who were living both in residences and in their own homes. homes, any hospital care.

Puri’s father was another victim. He had an intestinal problem that caused his capillaries to break and cause bleeding. When everything was closed due to confinement, they called his children to inform them that he had gotten sick again, and that this time he also had a fever. “They couldn’t take him to the emergency room. I proposed taking him directly to his hospital so they could give him a transfusion, but nothing. I also tried to be able to evaluate him, as a healthcare professional, but they wouldn’t let me see him,” he laments.

Puri tried everything to save his life. She called the management of the residence, the doctors, the nurses, the then manager of AMAS, she wrote emails to the Ministry of Health, to the president of the Community…, but nothing worked.

Desperate, she decided to go to the center: “I put on some Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that I had from work and went there. I told them that I was going up to check my father’s vein, that I, under my responsibility, would give him the iron injection that I needed, and they didn’t let me either. It was at the door of the residence, I could give it to the health workers who worked there if they didn’t have any. I knew that my father needed it, it was his usual treatment. He was leaving die…”.

“My testimony is that harsh, but it is not the only case. An acquaintance told me that, two days after burying her mother, they called her from the residence. They wanted to ask her when they were going to pick up her coffin. This happened because They let us see their lifeless bodies,” explains Puri.

Between March and April 2020, no one over 80 years old, regardless of their pathology, could leave any Madrid residence. During those months, mortality from covid among the elderly who lived in residences and who were not hospitalized exceeded 40% in the Community of Madrid, while in other communities that percentage ranged between 7.7% and 25.9%. .

The mortality rate among residents who were hospitalized was lower: between 27.7% and 42.5%, according to a study published last June in the international journal Epidemiology. There was only one exception: those who could pay for private insurance, who were derivatives.

This is how Ángeles explained it to this medium. When her mother fell ill on March 20, although at first they did not let him enter her residence to see her, they did allow him to take her out. The reason? She had private insurance for more than 50 years.

“When I found out that she was sick, I called the director, I told him that my mother had private insurance and that I was taking her out to the private part of the Jiménez Díaz Foundation. There she was able to get ahead. Then I took her home with a caregiver. My mother has lived with good quality for two more years, an opportunity that the elderly who did not have that insurance did not have. It saved her life,” she says.

According to those protocols, when a resident became ill, employees had to call the geriatrician liaison of the reference public hospital to decide whether SUMMA 112 would transfer him or not. On the other hand, if the patient had insurance, the professionals simply called their insurance to request a private ambulance and have them admitted. This discrimination was confirmed by the insurers themselves, who never had to carry out any type of selection that excluded people based on age.

A situation that draws attention, taking into account that the Government of the Community of Madrid had control of all hospitals (public and private) under a single command. As journalist Manuel Rico has detailed, the residents “could have received non-discriminatory medical care” through other means such as
medicalizing residences, making use of private hospitals or medicalized hotels. Instead, all those alternatives were blinded by “conscious and planned political decisions.”

“When they tell us to forget, I think, how can something like that be forgotten? It was a genocide, an injustice. They knew they were going to die and they were left alone. It is such a sad way to say goodbye… Nothing can assure us that, once once infected, he could have been saved; but he could have died with dignity. They didn’t even have oxygen for everyone, they took turns taking a bottle,” Puri says sadly.

Between pain and anguish, and with the aspiration to do justice, the families of the victims of the management of the regional government fight through all available judicial channels to investigate and clarify responsibilities. This same Tuesday, in fact, former general director of socio-health coordination of the Community, Carlos Mur, testified in the Plaza Castilla courts in a case opened by a complaint from the Platform for the Dignity of the Elderly (Pladigmare).