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Alcarràs is a municipality in the Segrià region, in Lérida, located at the epicenter of the black spots of the pandemic in Catalonia. There they have decided to face the public health crisis on their own, creating their own body of contact trackers of positive Covid-19 cases due to the lack of effectiveness of the Generalitat.

The new team is made up of 10 people, according to authorized sources from the city council; This represents one for every 942.2 citizens (9,422 in total), which contrasts with the 120 trackers that the outsourced tracking service currently has -with the Ferrovial company- of the Generalitat: one for each 62,500 inhabitants (7.5 millions in total). It should be noted that Alcarràs is the population that receives the highest number of seasonal workers to collect the fruit and vegetable harvests in its entire region.

The consistory requested days ago help both the Government of the Generalitat, which has all health powers after the end of the state of alarm, and the Delegation of the Central Government in Catalonia and the Military Emergency Unit (UME) to proceed to disinfect inside a nursing home, the largest in Lérida, where 43 positives have been registered so far. It so happens that both the UME and the Generalitat already carried out this cleaning work in the same residence at the beginning of the pandemic.

This Tuesday, the mayor, Manel Ezquerra -of Semper Alcarràs, who governs in coalition with Junts per Alcarràs, derived from Junts per Catalunya, who governs in Catalonia together with ERC- received a call from the delegate of the central Government in Catalonia, Teresa Cunillera , to inform him that he had personally contacted the Minister of the Presidency and spokesman for the Generalitat, Meritxell Budó, to try to coordinate and resolve it .

However, the City Council, like others in its region, complains about the lack of resources to combat the pandemic and also about the lack of accurate and constant information, which is why it has launched its own control system: 10 trackers of Alcarràs. Initially, they were hired for other functions, but then went on to act as surveillance officers and are now dedicated to tracking contacts of people who have tested positive for PCR or are suspected of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The team is completed by a temporary immigrant who helps search for possible infected people and informs them that they should not be afraid to go to the medical service or quarantine (14 days) since they will receive all the help they need. In addition, other City Council workers and the mayor himself, when any positive is detected, follow up. The consistory has already offered this equipment to the Health Department of the Generalitat, but has not received a response yet.

"We found out about the positives and their contacts between seasonal workers because they inform us of the farmers who hire them or by the temporary worker we have as liaison," clarify sources from the City Council. "Among the autochthonous population, we receive information from those affected, their relatives or their neighbors." Sometimes neighbors report that they have seen a positive who "leaves his house", or "people enter his house".

In other cases, the information comes from the affected person himself, who requests that food or drugs be brought to him. "That is why we complain about the lack of information from the Generalitat," explain the same sources. The ten municipal trackers have signed a confidentiality document to guarantee anonymity to the positives and their contacts .

Central State Aid

Despite this situation, which obliges municipalities to seek their own strategies, the Generalitat also does not accept all possible state aid , offered by the central government delegation. As this newspaper has learned, the sub-delegates of Lérida and Barcelona are part of the technical committees of the respective territorial plans for Civil Protection (Procicat), as well as the mayors of each area. In the meetings, some representatives of the municipalities have requested the help of the State, specifically from the UME, but the representatives of the Generalitat reject it because they say they do not need it, that they can face the situation alone.

For the State to act with its resources in Catalonia, it must be formally requested by the Government of the Generalitat; it is not enough that a municipality of the autonomous community requests it. In fact, the mayors who have requested help from the central government have received in response that without the approval of the Generalitat they cannot provide it .

To all this, the Catalan Government has already admitted that, to this day, a month after the end of the state of alarm, it still does not have a specific plan to control outbreaks of Covid-19 that prevents community transmission that can lead to the region to the second wave of the pandemic, with all the effects that this would have for citizens and companies and for the autonomous health system. "I will come with a plan that will tell us what the road map is," announced Josep Maria Argimon, the new secretary of Public Health for Catalonia, accompanied by the Catalan Minister of Health, Alba Vergés. "We will do everything it takes to have the plan well locked," said the counselor.

Today, for the first time, the Catalan health authorities will offer detailed information on the situation of the pandemic in Catalonia, by health regions and by regions (not by provinces), as announced by Argimon, who admitted that this is a "very complicated time "since there is already community transmission in Barcelona, ​​Hospitalet de Llobregat and Sant Feliu de Llobregat; in Lérida and Segrià, and in Figueres and Vilafant, Gerona. It must be remembered that in Lérida capital and six other municipalities, including Alcarràs, the population is still confined, although it has been raised as perimeter confinement so that workers and basic services can enter and leave.

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