12 May 2020
In an unusual way, TV3 has broadcasted in two different days two important reports that leave the government of Catalonia, the Generalitat, in a difficult position.
The first one was broadcast on the “Planta Baixa” program, which is a product contracted by the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation and therefore not produced by Catalan public television studios.
In this program, it was reported in detail that the Generalitat failed to comply with its own plan against pandemics, which dates from 2010. It was approved on the occasion of the Influenza A crisis and was intended to provide a pre-established response when crises of this nature occurred. According to the plan, the government should have started to apply measures from the moment the World Health Organization (WHO) signaled an alert, which it did on January 30, and also when cases were observed around geographic locations of Catalonia and in the same country.
On February 22 the circumstance of the strong incidence in Italy already occurred, and on February 26 isolated cases had been identified in Catalonia. According to this situation, the plan should have been activated on February 22 by the situation in Italy, meeting its criteria. But they did not until March 3. This difference is attributed to the fact that on February 29 Puigdemont called to the great act in Perpignan that could not have been carried out if PROFICAT, which was the name of the plan, had been activated on February 22. The first measures adopted by the Generalitat were not carried out until March 11 and on 12 announced the suspension of classes in schools and universities, and on 13 the confinement of Igualada.
This fact would highlight that the Catalan government deliberately failed to comply with its own planning for a political reason. It is evident that if the measures had been adopted as of February 22, the containment that Catalonia would have achieved would have been extraordinary.
In an unusual way, TV3 has broadcasted in two different days two important reports that leave the government of Catalonia, the Generalitat, in a difficult position.
The second major critical impact of TV3 has been the report on the program “30 minutes” this past Sunday, dedicated to what has happened in the nursing homes. The program, which is extremely harsh due to the facts it shows, presents the homes as a kind of isolated redoubt in which no attention of any kind arrived until late April. The program shows that they did not have protective material for the staff, nor were tests carried out to separate the infected from those who were not, nor were they provided with medical material to attend to serious cases. This fact was aggravated because from Department of Health the transfer of patients to hospitals was denied.
As the director of a home stated: “The public entities left us all alone without any kind of aid.”
The situation was truly tragic and has left consequences among older people and their caregivers, who were certainly not considered necessary staff in the fight against the pandemic. There were elderly people who died within 48 hours. By phone, the Generalitat issued instructions stating that the elders should be isolated in their rooms for lack of tests so that the department said they did not have material. Isolating a person aged 85 and over, who suffers from serious physical and cognitive decline in a small home room over the course of 15 days, with virtually no relationship to the outside, has been a cruel test that only made elders and their caregivers great distress.
Despite knowing that it was a source of contagion and having multiple cases, the Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) did not establish any specific organization so that a team of doctors could review the situation in these centers. They were given the same treatment as a private home and therefore the ICS doctor in the area took over. The result is that medical assistance came late. The protection material did not start arriving until April, and still sporadically. The homes had neither oxygen nor palliative elements to help patients. There are no data on induced mortality on pathologies other than coronavirus due to the stress generated by the combination of confinement and lack of medical care.
The result has been a high number of dead and infected people, more than 3,000. It remains to explain why the government of Catalonia did not adopt some of those measures that could have mitigated the catastrophe.
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