Spain’s care home nightmare
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why did so many people die in just one elderly care home in Madrid? After Covid-19 smashed its way across the globe, Spain - one of the worst-hit nations of Europe - is beginning to take stock of the devastation the virus has left in its wake. Most painful perhaps, will be an assessment of how the deadly contagion was able to rip through Spanish care homes at such speed, killing thousands of elderly people. In March 2020, the alarm was first sounded in a privately run institution, Monte Hermoso in Madrid. It is a story that has stayed with the BBC’s producer in Spain, Esperanza Escribano. She was in the capital when the reports of deaths at Monte Hermoso came to light. For Assignment, she joins Linda Pressly, to piece together the story of what happened within the care home’s red brick walls.
Editor: Bridget Harney
(Photo: Isabel Costales and her husband Ramon Hernandez. Isabel died during the coronavirus pandemic in a care home in Madrid. Photo Credit: Paula Panera)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Great, you've chosen to download this podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.0 | Well, there's really only one story in town, right? |
| 0:07.1 | The tragic impact of COVID-19. |
| 0:10.0 | Some deeply upsetting stories have already been told, and I'm afraid this is another. |
| 0:15.8 | In Spain, the elderly population of care homes has been perhaps the most vulnerable. |
| 0:20.6 | We decided to investigate what happened in just one of them in Madrid. |
| 0:24.0 | The phone call came in the middle of the |
| 0:29.0 | the The phone call came in the early hours of Monday morning around 1.30 a.m. |
| 0:38.0 | They called me and asked, are you the son of Casimiro Bernardo? |
| 0:45.0 | Yes, it can't be in redirect your cadver that is a morgue. |
| 0:48.0 | So come and collect his body, he's dead. That's Esperanza Escribano, translating the words of Thomas Bernardo. |
| 0:58.0 | Esperance is the BBC's producer in Spain, |
| 1:02.0 | and she'll be our guide in this week's assignment on the BBC World Service. |
| 1:06.0 | In Spain we've lived with coronavirus and its tragic consequences since the beginning of March. |
| 1:13.2 | But the shocking story I heard from Thomas about the death of his father at an old people's |
| 1:18.4 | home in Madrid stayed with me. |
| 1:21.8 | Well over 20,000 people have died from coronavirus in Spain and perhaps |
| 1:25.8 | more than half of all the victims were residents of care homes. Of course we know |
| 1:30.5 | Spain isn't alone. Around the globe, too many looked after people living in residential accommodation |
| 1:36.7 | have lost their lives to this pernicious disease. |
| 1:39.8 | But in Spain there are serious allegations of a cover-up. |
| 1:43.8 | I'm Linda Presley and with Esperanza translating from Spanish for us, |
... |
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