Falling Back. 39. Things Are Not Going Well.

As of today, only a maximum of five people can get together in Galicia, except certain cities and towns, like Santiago, where you are not allowed to get together with anyone outside your home circle. And the pandemic continues skewing our lives.

As of yesterday, over a million Spaniards have been infected, and over 35,000 have died. But those numbers are only the official numbers. Many say the real numbers are much higher; over two million infected, and an unknown number of people who have died, but were not counted as having died from the virus. 

An article in a German newspaper explains that the likely reasons for the explosion of Covid in Spain lies in our precarious job situation, and inattention to the well-being of the poor. Too many people are employed in temporary jobs, some of them black market jobs that don't pay into Social Security, so if the employee is sick or doesn't go to work, the employee isn't paid. But rent comes due, and one must eat, so the employee goes to work as long as they can pull themselves out of bed. The other problem is that too much housing is small and inadequate, with larger families living in close quarters, and neighbors mixing with neighbors continuously. 

Add to that the laxity of some regions' attempts to trace and test, and we have a nice bomb all ready to explode. Our daughter has a friend that went to study in Barcelona. Her boyfriend went out to be with her for a couple of weeks. They both wound up infected and quarantined in a small student's room. When they got tested, they were told to pick up the test results in three days. They were told they were positive, and to quarantine ten days. The personnel also asked for phone numbers of everyone they were in contact with. The two complied and handed them over. It turns out that the tracers didn't make any phone calls. No one from the Catalan department of health bothered to call the numbers they had been given, and warn the persons on the other end that they had been exposed, and that it was a good idea to get tested. 

That is another reason for this fall blow-up. Some regions make tests and give out the results in less than 24 hours, such as Galicia, but others take longer. One of the conditions to lift the state of alarm in June was that the regions would hire thousands of people to trace all possible contacts of each person that tested positive. Madrid promised, for example, to hire over a thousand tracers. In the end, they only hired a couple of hundred, and put most of the burden on primary care doctors, as is the case here, in Galicia. Primary care has been compromised, and people are not being traced, so contagion is spreading mostly unchecked. 

In some areas, such as Galicia and Madrid, the army has been called in to trace people, now. But the petition was made by the regional governments, not the central. That is another of the problems Spain has; that it is neither a federal state, nor a centralized state, but something in between with seventeen autonomous regions that pull, each in different directions. Regional governments don't have the authority to declare states of alarm in their regions because that is something that only the central government can do. But when the state of alarm was declared earlier this month for the region of Madrid, the regional president protested, saying it was not necessary. But she hadn't done much to prevent contagion except pose as the Virgin Mary for an interview in a magazine earlier in the year. She prefers to commend herself to Mary before facing the crisis and try to pull it up by the roots. 

Someone once wrote that individualism was both the savior and the downfall of Spain. It's quite true. 

Life continues.