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After giving birth, Vanesa Muro, infected with coronavirus , was separated for ten days from her baby, Oliver . Now together, she counts the hours before she can kiss and touch him without gloves or mask. Oliver is one of the babies "untouchable" by the coronavirus .

Not being able to feel your baby's skin for fear of catching it is the "most difficult", confesses this 34-year-old girl at her home in Madrid, the epicenter of the pandemic in Spain. "He takes your finger and touches the plastic (on the glove), poor man, it's not you. But hey, you shouldn't think about it, otherwise you will get depressed," she says.

Vanesa's cesarean delivery was scheduled for March 16. But it was in another life, before the coronavirus epidemic exploded in the country, the second largest in the world after Italy.

Vanesa's grandmother, 87, whom she saw every day, contracts the coronavirus and succumbs to it a week after Vanesa gave birth. Subject to risks as a pregnant woman, Vanesa is tested. Positive result.

With her husband Oscar Carrillo, they rush to the Madrid hospital in La Paz, where the young woman has to give birth, but "obviously she couldn't accompany me , she left me at the ER door, " Vanesa recalls. with emotion.

"Champion, let's go home"

Doctors are forced to perform a cesarean section. A moment full of "very hard feelings" for Vanesa, caught between the "fear" of contaminating her baby, the separation from her husband and being accompanied by doctors and midwives dressed in anti-pollution suits.

Oscar, also infected with coronavirus , recounts having lived "the longest hour and a half of (his) life", without being able to know how the birth of his first son took place. Everything is going well and Oliver is born on March 13 in good health, weighs 3.6 kilos and is 50 centimeters tall.

But nursing staff must separate him from his mother, put him in an incubator, and quarantine him until two negative tests allow him to join the other newborns in the maternity unit. After 48 hours of near-total isolation in her room , where staff without protective equipment returned as little as possible, Vanesa returns home. Without Oliver.

"It may sound silly, but having him seven floors down (than his hospital room) made me feel like he was closer to me," says the young mother. Only 10 days after birth, the couple was finally able to return for their son. But with gloves and a mask. "Champion, here we go," were Vanesa's first words when she was finally able to meet her son.

"It was incredible, it was as if he had been born that day too," Oscar and Vanesa testify. A moment that is recorded in the memory of Arantxa Fernández, a psychologist at the La Paz hospital whose support was "vital" for the couple and who sent them photos and videos of the baby every day.

In order to "kiss" him

Full of happiness that they were able to take their son home, the couple admits that the hardest part is not always being able to touch him without protection. Their 14-day quarantine since Covid-19 was diagnosed has ended, but since they cannot do another test to show that they are no longer carriers, they maintain all protective measures for another 14 days for safety.

"I still have not touched my son without my gloves (...) We yearn so much for the quarantine to end so I can touch him, kiss him," says Oscar along with Vanesa.

"It is difficult, but it is almost over. In a very short time, (Oliver) will have a month and we will go out. He will meet his grandparents, uncles and aunts. And all this will become a nightmare from which we will wake up, " says Vanesa.

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