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The founder of the Spanish Society for Microbiology, emeritus advisor to the infectious disease service at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, Emilio Bouza, maintains that Spain "lost precious time" in reacting to the coronavirus pandemic. And this, despite the insistent warnings that came from the Italian health system.

"At the end of February," as Dr. Bouza explained in the Reconstruction Commission's Health working group, "our colleagues in Italy were already warning us that people were dying like bedbugs."

"Since the virus appeared in Italy," he stressed, "and with evidence of person-to-person transmission, we have wasted precious time of no less than 10 days in reacting properly." Bouza has revealed that the first patient with Covid was admitted to the Gregorio Marañón on March 1 and on the 10th of that same month there were already 100 patients in that hospital with the same diagnosis; a fact that shows the virulence and the rapid expansion that already existed of contagion. Of these initial 100 patients, 23: 20 died, over the age of 75, and the other three, younger, had "very serious underlying illnesses."

In his opinion, the strategy adopted by the Spanish health authorities failed because, in general, it was accepted that "it was a coronavirus outbreak similar to the previous ones and that, as such, it would be limited to China and would have little impact on countries Westerners. "

"In Spain," he admitted, "everyone thought about it and it is a mea culpa that we must sing."

Based on this first hypothesis, a strategy based on the Ebola experience was launched. This is: "There are few cases, very localized and can be treated in a single center. It is assumed," he added, "that the problem would not spread and could be confined." "We overvalue," he said, "our ability to confine an outbreak."

The professor emeritus, who continues to carry out his assistance work and advises at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, explained that in February they received the order to send the samples of any patient who entered with symptoms to the Carlos III health center, an order in which " the Community of Madrid, fortunately, did not believe. " According to his account, the CAM called its microbiologists and began a PCR test preparation training in the four large Madrid hospitals "in such a way," he said, "that by the end of February they were ready and the flood that was it was upon us. "

Bouza, like all health experts who have appeared so far in the Congressional Reconstruction Commission, has regretted the lack of protective equipment and laboratory reagents that prevented the pandemic from being faced more effectively and aggravated its consequences. However, he praised "the enormous efforts" made by the Community of Madrid to provide the necessary material. "With limitations and difficulties," he said, "in our center there has never been a lack."

Doctor and professor Emilio Bouza has developed his more than 40 years of professional career at the Puerta de Hierro Clinic, at the University Hospital of California, at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital and at the Gregorio Marañón. In the latter, as head of the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases service, of which he now forms part as a care emeritus.

Throughout his entire career, he assures that he has never been submitted to participate in a great emergency plan. "I do not doubt that they exist," he said, "but tucked in some drawer." Nor has he ever known of any "bioterrorism" plan. "It is something that does not seem realistic in this country," he said.

In his opinion, the Spanish health system suffers from an excessive "compartmentalization" that prevents the efficient flow of information between primary care, hospitals, different specialists, military, public and private health, and in which it has been minimizing the importance of microbiology and infectious diseases to the point that many hospitals in Spain do not have a microbiological service and have to send all their samples to central laboratories, sometimes very far away. "The outsourcing of this service has been a profound mistake," he noted.

It has also influenced the excessive specialization of teaching plans, leaving aside training in techniques and essential common aspects: "In this pandemic, it has been found that very few doctors, apart from intensivists and anesthetists, who know how to intubate patients patients. Many surgeons couldn't help out in intensive care because they didn't know how to do it. "

To this he added, the "diminished" conditions of professional independence of the health workers as a consequence of the "temporary and precarious contracts" in which, he insisted, "the State Administration gives the worst example" and the enormous "bureaucratization "from research grants that turn scientific activity" into an ordeal ".

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