- Joined
- Oct 9, 2019
I can absolutely attest to the nursing home deaths having a large segment of mismanagement. Let me please refresh all of you on how spain's biggest spike in deaths came to fruition. Some may remember it from both my rants and the news. But. For the newer guys:
After lockdown corona hit the nursing homes through the caregivers. Nursing home staff and healthcare professionals are closely related and tend to come from the same families due to spain's traditionalist mindset so it's no wonder how the PPE crisis facilitated that jump. Do note that the PPE crisis was caused in big part by mismanagement and poor planing. So that's fuckup 1 related to this mess.
Fuckup 2 came when the homes got hit. You see, nursing homes are handled by the same system as the healthcare professionals in spain. And that system was at the time overworked by the turnabout of healthcare personnel caused by the shortage and the petitions caused by it. And so. When the staff started getting hit on the homes and asked for aid. They recieved none. That's strike 2.
This was made even worse by the date. This happened on a friday. And if you think spanish directives are gonna work on a weekend just because we're in the middle of the apocalypse, you have not seen enough bureaucratic state employees buddy. So many, many nursing homes were stuck in this crisis for 2 whole days until the army was finally called for aid on friday. That's the third OOF. They say 3 strikes and you're out. We still got more where that came from.
Since friday however, realizing this issue. Personnel started calling in EVERYONE. They knew the juntas, which are the ones officially in charge of this shit, weren't answering. So they put letters to ministry, gov, ISCIII, the politicians inside the juntas and consejerias themselves, mayors, province chiefs, etc. EVERYONE was warned by a flood of alarms. And yet. At autonomy level, no one answered. On Gov level ISCIII tried to call people in but most didn't even listen and the ones that did only told the lower ranks and called it a day. At province level, only Kichi, from Cadiz, acted. Some other homes got saved by mayors at municipio and localidad levels. But those were the inmense minority.
Kichi btw might as well be the reason I find myself allied with Podemos given human form. He's a unioner and teacher from the Netherlands that migrated to cadiz at an early age. And most recently joined Podemos and got elected in Cadiz. Shit is. Many would think he's... a bit crazy. He was part of the Anticapitalist party before Podemos formed. He's said some stupid shit. Even tried to take the side of the migrants during the latest waves (and was thankfully stopped by the junta... god that would've been stupid), but whenever Cadiz has had issues he's been there to aid as much as he could. He has had no issues taking more right wing and even capitalist mindsets when they were the best sollution despite the ideology, and has been glad to deal with the right wing Junta whenever it helped Cadiz since they got elected. So, Kichi might be a bit of a dullard and a bit of a radical. But I didn't vote for him to be a role model. I voted for him so he could help Cadiz grow. And Cadiz under his rule has indeed grown considerably, and he's clearly been a factor in it by taking his position seriously. I don't think I can ask for more.
But point is. Cadiz was the only province to take care of the nursing homes. Outside of us you only saw 1 or 2 pwr autonomy being saved by local politicians. As for the rest? For 2 whole days they had either extremely reduced personnel or no personnel at all, with the experts isolated all they could do not to infect the patients was try to phone the few nurses for instructions, in the homes that still had nurses, not that that helped much as they were quickly overwhelmed. And the virus went almost unchecked after the first wave. And so by the time the army arrived, they found an image worthy of the most active warzones. Nurses having broken mentally, corpses left to rot, the more mentally unstable patients having freed themselves and running rampant. In 2 days the nursing homes became hell.
After that fuckup, thankfully, the army did take control. Saved a surprising number of patients even amongst the ones heaviest hit by the virus, and quarantined the area. And now since the nursing homes are fully quarantined and priorized for gear after that first spike we managed to stop the slaughter almost entirely. Now they are even safer than before the virus.
But what did it take to get here? Hell. It took a complete collapse. The point is that while in spain both the fuckup and the recovery were spectacular. Because I guess we never do things the boring way around here. Other countries are handling it in similar but different ways. Ways that might be even worse. I'll mention the 1 glaring exception. Germany. I am slowly becoming convinced that their proficiency at preemptively quarantining the old folks homes might be the most decisive factor in their low lethality. Props to them
But everywhere else? Sure we haven't seen another apocalyptic collapse. But instead the homes have never been properly quarantined. And the result is that while you don't have that one megaspike that makes it look like a fucking meteorite hit the country. The percentage of dead retirees is creeping steadily to the point that it surpassed spain already in many places. Italy, the UK, NYC, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc. All have this issue.
And indeed this isn't just because corona. It's also because of lack of personnel, lack of gear, etc. Those deaths have probably been accelerated by the lockdown instead of avoided.
So. While a well done lockdown like the germans, poles and eastern europe/balkans is decisive in aiding the country (though I'd say you fuckers should've started deescalating already, at least the krauts anyway), a badly msde lockdown like the early spanish one or the one seen in most countries, can actually increase lethality considerably.
As always. Lockdowns are just lockdowns. It's in aplication and execution that the devil can be found.
) and new tiny tyrant. 
