The coronavirus crisis in Spain accelerated as it did not abide by warnings

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The Spanish epidemic has a painful example of one government’s tendency to forget about reports from countries where the virus has already hit.

By Raphael Minder

MADRID – Last January, a German tourist became the first coronavirus patient in Spain. At the time, the physical risk seemed to be for the country as remote as the small Spanish island of La Gomera, where it was being treated. Two weeks later, the German left the hospital and Spain celebrated being back “virus-free”.

This turned out to be a very brief respite. But even as more and more cases appeared, Spanish officials continued to point out that the coronavirus was being imported, especially on some other island through Italian tourists, where hospitals were already under siege. The story that Spain faced an external threat, but did not threaten a national epidemic

But on February 26, a Sevillian neighbor, who had not made any trips, tested positive. A week later, another boy from the Valencia region has become the first victim of the coronavirus in Spain, initiating a dark count of 14,000 deaths. Spain now occupies the moment in the world, the United States, in the global number of cases.

The Spanish crisis has shown that one of the symptoms of the virus, now as persistent as the fevers, the pains and discomfort it causes, has been a government’s tendency after forgetting reports from countries where the virus attacked before.

Starting with China, the virus has circled the world, crossing the threshold of one million international infections last week. But as in peak countries, the Spanish government first treated the virus as an external threat, which contemplating that its country might be the next domino to fall.

[Update: China ends Wuhan’s blockade, but life remains a remote dream].

The epidemic has now forced Spaniards to face the kind of struggle that only other people old enough to have lived during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s can remember.

Health unions are suing the government for not protecting them: more of its members have become inflamed in Spain than anywhere else in the world, even forcing doctors and nurses to use garbage bags instead of medical gowns. Patients sleep in the hospital hallways.

In Madrid, the country’s largest ice rink has an emergency body depot, while its main exhibition centre has been remodeled in a cashier’s hospital, which has opened up in what fitness unions have described as disastrous race conditions. In one of the heighte of horror of this crisis, Spanish infants discovered older citizens deserted or killed in the beds of their retirement homes.

“It’s shocking for a society to face a scenario that only Spaniards who leave the war know,” said Cristina Monge, professor of Sociology at the University of Zaragoza. For many others, he added, “this kind of scenario has been natural science fiction so far.”

As a result, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government has been criticized for banning previous mass gatherings and for not storing medical devices as soon as the number of cases reached several hundred in northern Italy in late February.

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