The coffins are lined up alphabetically in eight rows on an ice rink. Dozens of hospitals from all over Madrid arrive daily. And when they leave, on the way to the cemetery, dozens of new coffins come to occupy their square until they complete almost half a thousand. This happens every day for too many days. We will always remember the weeks when the Covid-19 pandemic raged on the Spanish. And when we look back, an image will come to our mind to express so much pain. Because the Ice Palace in Madrid was a place designed for joy, for innocent leisure, for the expansion of the will to live; but today it is the national symbol of a tragedy as Spain has not known another since the Civil War.

Our country has a dramatic record: the number of deaths per inhabitant. No other nation in the world has such a high case fatality rate . And the worst thing is that the official death data -13,798 at press time-is only the tip of the sinister iceberg. Because those who have died without having been admitted or tested or autopsied could triple that number. Firefighters confess that they have never had to rescue so many lone corpses on their floors. The Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha reported on Monday that the burial licenses issued were 1,921. Almost three times what Health recognizes: 708. In March 2019 there were 1,691 deaths for the 3,319 this March. If we extrapolate this logic to the whole of Spain we will discover that the Covid-19 would have already killed between 27,000 and 41,000 people.

When death takes industrial proportions we run the risk of turning it into statistics . Numbers, curves, or graphs help inform the evolution of the pandemic; and nevertheless his asepsis narcotizes, it blurs the contours of the incredible human drama that we suffer. And that is not fair with the dead, with the singular tear that each one of them supposes; but above all it is not fair with the living. That they don't deserve distraction strategies. That they have the right to form the exact idea of ​​what is happening. It is human to avoid suffering. It is infamous to try to hide it.

We are well aware that the photographs that open this edition of EL MUNDO, and that its readers owe to the formidable work of Fernando Lázaro, contain a harsh truth that strikes those who see them. But the job of journalism is not to sweeten the facts, as if the public were a minor, but to expose them to the adult judgment of citizens as clearly as possible. The news is that Spaniards die hundreds each day. That their bodies must be kept on an ice rink because funeral homes are not enough. And that it would be monstrous if we got used to the daily mutilation of our social body.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • Spain
  • Madrid
  • Castilla la Mancha

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