• Controversy, limits the manager of the Virgen Macarena Hospital in Seville after criticism of the management of the pandemic
  • Pandemic: all the information about the coronavirus in Andalusia
  • Media: Lack of material in hospitals forces lowering of protection protocols for health personnel

“I was diagnosed with pharyngitis, a common cold, and told to keep working, but they should have sent me home. I was a bomb. Who speaks is the health service that the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) itself places at the origin of the outbreak that has placed the Virgen Macarena hospital in Seville at the forefront of infections by health professionals throughout Andalusia. We will call him Arturo, although that is not his real name, which he has asked not to spread to preserve his privacy.

Arturo is the zero patient of the coronavirus in the Virgin Macarena, the toilet that sparked contagions among the staff - eleven doctors and five nurses only in the first days; they are now 138- and their "diagnostic error" , as SAS itself calls it, is the axis of the internal investigation ordered by the Ministry of Health and which has charged, as the first victim, the manager of the hospital center, Francisco Merino, who resigned on Tuesday alleging "personal reasons."

Merino is attributed the prohibition to wear masks in the first days in Macarena, as El Confidencial announced, and Arturo points out, along with other hospital officials who ignored his warnings and forced him to continue working in the ER when he was already infected with coronavirus.

She says that on March 11 “she had a sore throat and joint pain, a cough and a feverish sensation. I was vaccinated with the flu and I didn't like it ». He went to Preventive Medicine and from there to Infectious, but they applied the current protocol at that time, which did not contemplate performing the coronavirus test on the healthcare providers unless they had been at risk.

Arturo was directly sent to his ER post after being diagnosed with pharyngitis, "a common cold."

He was four or five days with symptoms and on the 23rd, when he joined his shift, he learned that most of his colleagues had become ill. "I didn't have anything anymore," he says. A few days earlier, on Friday the 20th, those health workers gave the alert when they presented symptoms of coronavirus.

He went to Infectious again, and then yes, they put their hands on their heads and "they told me that I would have to be in my house in isolation from the first day." But it was too late.

"He could have done a lot of damage, we got it because they did not take the disease seriously," denounces this professional, who is now fully recovered but marked, he says, so he has lived on the front line against the virus.

And it could have been much worse because, he says, he insisted on wearing a mask when dealing with patients, but he did not use protection when he was with his colleagues. And what happened happened.

Mask protocols

At that time, as EL MUNDO de Andalucía announced at the time, the protocols required lowering protection against the lack of material in health centers. They were guidelines, according to the Board, of the Ministry of Health.

It was not exclusive to Macarena, it happened in practically all health centers. In the last weeks of March, the nursing staff of the Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville denounced new rules for the use of masks that reduced the cases in which their use was considered necessary.

In Andalusia 3,622 health professionals have been infected with coronavirus since the pandemic broke out, according to the latest official data. That represents 30% of the total of all registered cases of Covid-19, the highest percentage in the entire country, where the average of infections is 20%, in turn the highest in the world. Hospitals, especially in the beginning, became real sources of contagion.

Like the Virgin Macarena, with 138 positive for coronavirus among her health personnel, of whom there are currently nine sick.

According to the data handled by the Health Sector Board, the positives and the suspects add up to 267 cases in Macarena, the highest number of all Andalusian hospital centers, at a great distance from the 204 recorded in Virgen del Rocío, the 177 from the Malaga Regional Hospital, 95 from the Virgen de las Nieves Hospital in Granada or 47 from the Reina Sofía in Córdoba.

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