On March 15, 2020, when Spain was once again in lockdown after confirming the terrible contagion capacity of COVID-19, an instruction signed by the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, determined that the Spanish Armed Forces and their resources sanitary facilities would be placed at the service of the civil authorities to help manage the pandemic under a single command, led by the Chief of Defense Staff, General Miguel Ángel Villarroya, who ended up resigning for having been vaccinated at advance.
The one called Operation Balmis – in memory of the doctor who led the expedition to extend the smallpox vaccine to America and the Philippines – had as its epilogue a large 500-page document with conclusions and lessons learned for internal use, to which elDiario .es had access via a question to the Transparency Portal and after several attempts to obtain the minutes of the pandemic, which was not provided, with the Defense claiming that it is working documentation “ auxiliary and support”.
The file tells of the enormous military activity of social, logistical and health support of the army throughout Spain (from the establishment of hospitals to the movement of equipment or disinfection) and also how the lethality in homes retirement forced a change in the course of the operation. the Community of Madrid.
“The first days, requests for disinfection and support in general focused mainly on logistical support for the assembly of shelters, disinfection of critical infrastructure and support for the control of the measures decreed in the state of alarm in the nerve centers of communication in the city,” specifies the internal report on demands in the region.
But “on March 21, there was a dizzying change in the operation, having to redirect part, if not the majority, of the efforts to support the disinfection of retirement homes, taking into account the evolution of the health situation in said centers, where”. the pandemic hit the most disadvantaged hard and created conditions that would make it difficult to take care of our elderly people.”
This caused the plans to change and the EMU (Military Emergency Unit) spent weeks disinfecting the residences, where it carried out more than 1,400 actions due to the avalanche of requests made by the civil authorities. In reality, since March 15, the epidemiology service has been alerting the Ayuso government of an epidemic of infected people in the Monte Hermoso residence and of the terrible scenario that was looming in the centers for the elderly if measures were not taken , a warning that was not heeded. from the Community of Madrid.
At least since February, the virus was already circulating in many of the almost 500 residences that the Community has, with more than 45,000 elderly people living indoors and locked up, because the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso had decreed the 8 March that no one could go out. or enter. The regional government has decided to block almost all referrals of elderly people living in retirement homes to hospitals (some scales have been carried out, called “protocols of shame”), which motivated the presentation last Thursday of a collective complaint to the public prosecutor’s office from relatives of 115 elderly people, 111 of whom died.
The reasons given by the Defense report for the chaos in the residences were “in many cases fear of the people responsible for caring for them and in others a lack of resources made this group more vulnerable.”
Indeed, the only initiative dedicated to elderly people in retirement homes during the pandemic, who were also prohibited from going to health centers, was the so-called Operation Bug, the hiring of independent workers with the help of a dozen doctors. of Venezuelan nationality, without a contract, and to whom Health has never paid. The centers were also not medicalized, contrary to what was announced in an official press release and what Díaz Ayuso assured in an interview with Telecinco.
Fewer resources for Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha
The critical situation has also forced, as reflected in the Army report, to withdraw resources for Castile-La Mancha and Extremadura: “The evolution of the situation in the retirement homes of Madrid has led to the adoption of the measure of not assigning or assigning minimum tasks to the UME battalion based in Madrid in Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha, the usual area of action of this battalion. The panorama discovered by the armed forces was reflected a few months later by the European Committee of the Regions, which estimated that Madrid was the region in Europe with the greatest excess deaths due to the pandemic, with 44% more than usually. Behind are the Italian region of Lombardy (39%) and Castilla-La Mancha (34%).
Those same days, and while many families were trying to get their loved ones out – even if it meant continuing to pay so as not to lose their place – the Community of Madrid decided to launch a project that consumed a large part of the resources of the Spanish military assigned to Madrid: the Ifema field hospital, set up from scratch in 30 hours.
The brutal project to raise Ifema
“The first day of the operation [Balmis]On March 16, a request was received from Samur Social Madrid for the creation of a temporary shelter for the homeless at the Madrid Exhibition Center (…). Without breaking continuity, with the recently created Ifema shelter, on March 20, Samur Social de Madrid requested the creation of a second shelter. While they were there, Isabel Díaz Ayuso turned everything upside down again and began construction of a hospital in Ifema itself, just as outbreaks in the residences were beginning to become known.
“The construction of this hospital was a challenge never seen before, creating a field hospital capable of treating approximately 5,000 patients in an open ward where there was absolutely nothing,” continues the file, which highlights the huge collaboration. as positive with the civil authorities to launch this “pharaonic work”.
Ifema needed the best men and women in the army: “the most qualified personnel were appointed, capable of bringing their experience and knowledge to carry out this colossal undertaking. » Military medics and paramedics were sent “to set up and maintain 6 intensive care stations for critical patients.” From this point on, staff will remain at the facility, caring for intensive care patients 24/7, until the hospital closes on May 1, 2020. » This hospital campaign ultimately treated mainly mild cases and 23 elderly people from nursing homes whose condition was not serious were referred there.
However, the Army’s vision of this project is positive, as reflected in the report: “The work carried out during these months in this hospital shows the importance of civil-military relations and the strengthening of these relations as another example of the necessary interrelationship between the armed forces. The forces and the society they serve.
The other point that the Army highlights in Madrid is “the management of corpses and the transfer of coffins from the various hospitals in Madrid to the intermediate warehouses established by the Community due to the saturation of funeral services. This activity is one of the most difficult that was carried out during Operation Balmis, physically, but above all psychologically and emotionally,” he admits. Indeed, the Ministry of Defense reported that upon their arrival in certain residences, members of the armed forces had found corpses sharing space with living elderly people, without however specifying in which centers this occurred or if it was in Madrid.
In addition to the data from Madrid, the Operation Balmis report makes a detailed tour of each of the autonomous communities and highlights that in 98 days, 20,000 actions were carried out in more than 2,000 localities and 5,300 interventions in residences in across the country. , among other tasks. The final analysis is positive, detects some possible improvements in coordination in future situations and reflects in conclusion that “we must strengthen our crisis management system to be able to act more quickly in the first phases of the emergency and guarantee this protection to our citizens (. …). This operation left other singularities, they were numerous, but one stands out strongly: the will to win of the entire group which had the privilege of participating in Balmis. The alignment of all levels, from political to tactical, in strict compliance with the main mission, saving lives, has been completely exemplary, a model to follow in the future. »
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