Over 4,000 Covid victims at Madrid care homes ‘could have been saved’

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Citizen-led commission suggests deaths may have been avoided if transfers to hospital were allowed

A doctor attends to a woman at a care home in Pozuelo de Alarcon in the Madrid region on 15 April 2020.A doctor attends to a woman at a care home in Pozuelo de Alarcon in the Madrid region on 15 April 2020.The lives of more than 4,000 care home residents in Madrid could have been saved if the regional government had allowed them to be treated in hospitals, the findings of a citizen-led Covid commission have suggested.

“That request to be transferred, from the nursing home, from the family member, and being told no from emergency services, from the hospital – that was a political decision,” said Fernando Lamata Cotanda, a doctor and politician who oversaw the health portfolio in a regional Socialist government and who was part of the seven-person commission. “They may not have died had other political decisions been made.

The source said the authors of the study did not take into account “that population density is a determining factor in the incidence of this virus”. The Madrid region initially launched an inquiry into the care home deaths, but the effort was stalled in 2021 after. After campaigners’ calls to restart the inquiry were ignored, they launched the citizen-led commission, led by a former judge from Spain’s supreme court.

Her organisation has also sought justice in the Spanish courts, launching more than 300 legal challenges against the regional government, care home directors and some of the companies that run the homes. While the bulk of these challenges have been dismissedprosecutors of failing to properly investigate the legal challenges, citing the fact that some cases were closed before families or care home staff were contacted.

 

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