‘My feeling is this is the beginning of the pandemic’

“Unless you go to the hospital, you don’t realize what’s out there; that’s how I felt at the beginning of the pandemic.” PaulaThe 40-year-old has witnessed firsthand the situation in which many medical centers in Spain are facing closure due to the epidemic. Flu cases increase On January 3, his mother went to the emergency room of Valladolid Rio Hotega hospital because she was very tired.

“have people sitting on the ground People were lying alone on stretchers in the hallway because there were no rooms because they wouldn’t let family in… My mother’s roommate was 93 years old and they left her in the hallway for hours, she was disoriented and alone , without wearing a mask. According to her daughter, they took her away because she had respiratory failure and tested negative for COVID-19 and influenza A, but now she is infected with influenza A and has a fever of 38.5 degrees. He caught her in the hospital,” he said.

The scenario Paula describes is the result of an increase in respiratory infections this Christmas, some caused by Covid-19 and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), but especially influenza A.In the last week of 2023, influenza primary care rates were 438.3 cases per 100,000 inhabitantscompared to the previous week’s 249.4, meaning an increase 75.74%.The influenza hospitalization rate that week reached 9.5 cases per 100,000 residents (compared to 5.9 cases the previous week), setting a national record for hospitalizations. Over 80 years oldThere are 62 hospitalizations per 100,000 residents.

Paula’s 77-year-old mother, who was hospitalized in Río Hortega when we spoke with influenza A and was awaiting diagnosis of the cause, can attest to the strain these numbers are putting on hospitals. . in the lungs. She was discharged from the hospital a few hours later. Her daughter explained that when she got over the flu, she would have a bronchoscopy.

While hospitalized, she was admitted to the pulmonary ward, but a closed area Paula said it was well prepared to deal with the outbreak. “They had to open a whole new wing. There was no heat and it was very cold; I kept my coat on the first day and now it’s warmer,” he said.

“The outlook for the factory is dire. Almost everyone is in quarantine because they have influenza A. Nurses are overwhelmed They don’t pay attention to us. The antihypertensive drugs my mother usually takes are becoming increasingly ineffective, and her blood pressure has risen a lot. You see them running down the hallway. I have seen very unpleasant images. A family member came into the hallway: “Please, please, he drowns!”. They were running in double robes and masks. “

In some rooms, he said, they added an extra bed and made it three beds instead of two. “This morning a guard told me they had to Removing the stretcher from the consultation Because they don’t have these,” continues to describe in detail the saturation suffered by the hospital. Paola was also one of the people who recently contracted influenza A. “I caught him at a party in Valladolid on the 16th (December) Got her remember 90’s music, about 2,000 people.go 30 friends fucked her and 27 of us., except for my two brothers and another friend. We actually had two friends admitted to the hospital, ages 47 and 48, and thankfully they’re doing well, one with bronchitis and the other with pneumonia. “Then I found out that the boy who was DJing had taken it too.”

Paula also explained that when her mother showed up at the emergency room, the person treating her told her, I should go to the health center. That’s what the septuagenarian did, and her family doctor sent her back to hospital after seeing her condition. Paola’s feeling, which was echoed by a family doctor from Terrassa (Barcelona) who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that the emergency is diverting cases they consider less serious due to saturation. “Our ability to transport patients to hospital is limited because they are oversaturated, when they saw that the case was not very complicated, they received the order and sent them here again. We’re just sending complicated pneumonia and bronchitis that we can’t overcome,” he said.

This doctor, like other colleagues at the health center where she works, does not conduct initial consultations these days, but instead makes referrals from her outpatient clinic to the emergency room, which is open from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. “On average, every physician we serve About 40 or 40 people a day. People are waiting in line. Delay of two and a half hours or three hours. Everybody has the same symptoms, flu, fever…”, he explains. “Yesterday, we had 220 visits to the emergency room; Wednesday, 206; Tuesday, 297…”, he details. Usually on average 150-200 people show up every day.

“It’s 7:30 now, 247 people in emergency rooms, there are already people sitting on the chairs waiting for service. In priority 2 (42 patients), 58 patients are awaiting admission. ” The Mats union announced on January 3 the situation at the Doce de Octubre hospital in Madrid.

Two days later, after 3:00 pm on Thursday, there were about 50 people in the emergency outpatient clinic area for treating mild cases, with few empty seats and constant coughing. The one heard most was Yaskara, 65, who was with her son. “Very bad, i can’t breathe “I was very weak, I couldn’t walk, I felt very dizzy, my head exploded,” he said.

Not far from her sat Juan Carlos, 53, wearing an FFP2 mask and suffering from since 10 days The coronavirus has not gone away. His breathing wasn’t easy and he was still tired. In the morning he went to the health center and they suspected he had pneumonia and sent him to the hospital. He is awaiting a chest X-ray.