Isabel Zendal Hospital in Madrid, nicknamed the Pandemic Hospital, opened on Tuesday December 1.

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Paul White / AP / SIPA

Emerged from the ground in a few months, the "pandemic hospital", Madrid's new public hospital, was inaugurated this Tuesday in Spain, without a patient or a caregiver.

This huge complex that can accommodate up to a thousand patients has opened its doors despite heated controversy.

This new establishment, located near the airport of the capital and bearing the name of nurse Isabel Zendal, was inaugurated by the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, of the Popular Party (PP, conservative), who carried the project.

The hospital is still empty and an AFP journalist could see through his large windows that wires were still hanging from the ceiling.

Adapted to disasters and epidemics

The region, responsible for health, has so far found only 116 voluntary caregivers - selected from employees already under contract in other hospitals - to work there and has not specified whether it intends to hire any other people for this new establishment.

This hospital is "adapted to all the situations that we can know", whether it is about "catastrophes" or "new epidemics", welcomed Isabel Diaz Ayuso, affirming that it would have the unit of “Madrid's most advanced intensive care”.

A "useless" project

The objective of this hospital, with an area of ​​80,000 m2, is to relieve the rest of the health network of Madrid, whose saturation during the first wave of the pandemic had led to the installation of a field hospital in a city ​​exhibition pavilion.

But its construction has been very strongly criticized by many caregivers in the capital.

Invited to the inauguration, the Socialist Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, did not make the trip.

Despite a large police force, dozens of caregivers and hostile demonstrators had gathered Tuesday in front of the building to denounce a project they consider "useless" and whose final cost is double the initial budget.

"There are unused beds in other hospitals" and the resources mobilized for this hospital could have been intended "for things really necessary like tracers (of contacts with the Covid), personnel or equipment", declared to AFP Alga Álvarez, laboratory technician at the Gregorio Marañón hospital in Madrid.

Spain remains one of the countries in Europe most affected by the pandemic, with more than 45,000 deaths and more than 1.6 million cases.

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