“Girl, this is a patient who has been PCR positive for over two months!”
Here I am again with my modest pills from the hospital forehead. Micro-privileges (hhhmmmm errrr hããã) of those who are chronic patients and need to undergo periodic examinations. Today, a blood test is on the menu.
The nurse, young and flushed, perhaps so much seringuistic activity, since it is 2 o’clock in the afternoon, extracts the burgundy fluid from my veins grated from so much sting while she tells me.
“We’ve seen it with a certain frequency, that of being positive over and over again,” he says. “Poor old people who are in line for surgery, who have to come back here every two for three, without being able to be operated!”
“Each of the tres”: Spanish expression equivalent to our “” it turns and moves “; often.
In fact, the lobby is dominated by old people waiting their turn to take that hot swab in their nostrils.
The relative placidity of the first floor gives rise to a yellow and red riot on the ground floor of the hospital with Catalan mezzo, unionized mezzo flags. Small town in front of the emergency entrance.
A doctor who observes from a distance, like me, approaches and comments: it is the cleaning ladies. They have been protesting for more than a year for being excluded from the extra bonus that only health workers received during the pandemic.
“If they risk as much as we do!” – open your arms, indignant. “They worked twice, like us. Every time we break up with a patient, he takes action. With protection and all, but even so… ”- leaves the sentence in the air. No need to finish, I understand. “The aid would be around 300 euros, which is not a lot, but for them, yes,” he adds.
I do a mental calculation: friend, where is a little 300 euros? Almost 2 thousand reais. I am Brazilian, my friend.
Demonstration in front of the Hospital de Sant Pau, one of the most important in Barcelona, April 2021 (Susana Bragatto / Folhapress)
The main poster of the small demonstration denounces the “invisibility” of the collective dedicated to leaving hospitals, corridors and operating rooms clean, sterilized, ready for new cures.
Let’s go to the veire, of course: if it was a protest of doctors and nurses, the press would appear sapando, replicando, making the headlines. But no. This cloudy Friday in Barcelona, just me, wearing a red overcoat and looking tired, writing a low-key column for a newspaper besides the sea.
Angry, a young protester explains to me: not only did they not receive such a bonus, but they do not have the support of Social Security in the event of a positive for the coronavirus – unlike health professionals, for which a license by Covid is considered an accident at work.
***
Spain is preparing for May 9, the date of the end of the state of emergency, in force since last March, when the pandemic broke out. Restaurants, for example, can stay open until 11 p.m. In theory, there would also be no curfew (in the case of Catalonia, between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.) in effect for six months.
But the Catalan government is already thinking of leaving a decree-law up its sleeve that would keep it with a certain flexibility, leaving us free until 11 p.m. or midnight.
Although the Covidian graphs show signs of improvement (just over 9,000 cases and 136 deaths across the country in the past 24 hours) and vaccination has picked up in the past month (so far , 10% of the population having been vaccinated with both doses), Spain has taken too long to come out of fate to release all that is sin más.
It is true, however, that June is coming, the classic month when tourists start arriving to enjoy SummerZão Español. British press vehicles are already celebrating the border reopening announced by the Spanish government (with 8,415,879 RAPs and reservations), and hotel bookings are already so crazy.
I remember the unhealthy times when drunken ‘foreigners’ wouldn’t let us sleep with their parties in rented apartments, or so crowded with Barcelona’s cultural and historical attractions that we residents gave up trying our tour, overwhelmed by so much greed. It will be a long and curious summer …
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