Madrid (AFP)

When the caregivers interrupt their work to applaud, it is the signal that a patient is cured of the Covid-19, at the Madrid exhibition center turned into a field hospital where more than a thousand patients are bedridden.

A few minutes from the airport, the Ifema Fair in Madrid usually hosts congresses, concerts and fashion shows.

But since March 21, the name "Ifema" only serves to designate the temporary hospital set up in haste by the army and by the Madrid region, the most bereaved in Spain with nearly 5,000 deaths from the new coronavirus of the nearly 11,000 identified in the country.

Under the harsh light of the neon lights of Pavilion 9, a nurse, only masked, stops short on reaching one of the yellow lines which delimit the so-called "dirty", contaminated area, where only fully protected carers work.

Removable partitions separate units from twelve white beds, two meters apart from each other and sometimes fitted with oxygen cylinders. A patient sleeps deeply, another pianote on her phone, a third peels an orange.

Three masked patients are waiting, seated. They were declared cured. And the applause bursts out when they get up to leave.

"There have already been 900 people healed in this hospital where more than 2,000 patients have passed" and eight have died, said AFP Fernando Prados, general coordinator of the structure, set up to decongest overworked hospitals.

Supposed to house 5,500 beds in the long term, it "stopped for the moment at 1,500", he explains, because hospitals in the region are gradually seeing a decrease in the number of emergency patients.

- Three gloves for each hand -

Maria Sanchez Fernandez, a 29-year-old nurse, daily disinfects the protective plastic face shield on which she wrote her name.

"In the beginning, we were given four gloves (to put on each other, note), now they say that two are enough. When in doubt, I put three, it's my health first," said this nurse usually working in a health center, and came as a "volunteer".

Also 29 years old, Maria Luisa Prados Jimenez is part of a battalion of young interns, in the final year of medicine, requisitioned for Ifema while pursuing their guards in the real hospitals of the city.

This structure was designed for less severe cases, "relatively stable patients", she explains. But "a 63-year-old man with no significant history suddenly saw his condition worsen on Thursday, we had to send him to the Gregorio Marañon hospital for intensive care and now I found out he is in very serious condition ".

The sixties, "it seems young, it's my father's age," added this girl from a doctor in Andalusia (south), who worries about him.

Noting that at the very beginning, "it was a bit of chaos and disorganization" in Ifema, which has been the subject of numerous criticisms, she notes that "it has improved a lot" since Monday.

"We can now request a lung scan or X-ray" while a small intensive care unit has started operating.

In a huge neighboring warehouse, which you only enter after disinfecting your shoes, soldiers in lattices are busy sorting sanitary equipment, part of which has arrived from China.

- "Tenderness" and "humanity" -

On the threshold of the exhibition center, Eduardo Lopez, a 59-year-old construction worker, breathes the scent of relief. He is one of the patients declared cured and will rush into a taxi.

Very moved, he gives the rating of "10/10" to all those who treated him "with tenderness and a huge dose of humanity".

But it will remain marked by "the suffering generated by the disease and the uncertainty: it weakens psychologically to know that so many people die and that it is reality, not a series that you would watch on TV".

© 2020 AFP