120,000 deaths and a narrative that doesn't add up

Six years on, the balance sheet of the pandemic in Spain

In March 2020, Madrid's care homes became the first front of a health war nobody had declared. The elderly were dying without medical care, while workers' warnings clashed with an official narrative that spoke of "isolated cases". Six years later, that scene has become a symbol of the dispute over the handling of the pandemic in Spain: the clash between those who argue the state was negligent, if not incivil, and those who maintain that everything possible was done with limited information.

The starting point of any analysis is the figure that appears in every debate: more than 120,000 deaths. But that's where the problems begin. "More than 120,000 people died," the refrain goes. The question is how many of them died from ELbichito-19 and how many with ELbichito-19. The official accounting mixes both categories, and the excess mortality data from the EUROMOMO project suggest the labelling was, at the very least, generous. Terminal cancer with a positive PCR test was counted as ELbichito. A traffic accident, if the test arrived in time, too. The suspicion that the figures were inflated to justify exceptional measures runs through the entire debate.

The protocols that killed: negligence or conspiracy?

The murkiest ground is hospital treatments. Critics cite the Padua autopsy study, which as early as March 2020 pointed to damage consistent with thrombosis rather than classic pneumonia, and the warning of a New York doctor against early intubation and the mass use of ventilators. At the other end, defenders of the official response remind us that the scientific community had no clear protocols and that decisions were improvised with the best intentions. "Lethal protocols" versus "humiliating measures", such as mandatory outdoor masks, which were never imposed in Sweden. The Swedish case has become the uncomfortable mirror: same bicho, opposite strategy, comparable results in excess mortality.

Care homes: those who died in silence

Care homes are the wound that never heals. "The old people died abandoned," the saying goes, with examples of facilities where the army entered in March 2020 to find corpses. The criticism extends to the "balcony police", the officers who fined anyone who stepped outside while claiming to defend the "best healthcare system in the world". Ironically, the same people who applauded the response later boasted about the public system when they needed an ICU bed.

Six years on, nobody is held accountable

The most jarring fact: as of this discussion, no political, health or military official has been tried for the decisions of 2020. The phrase "crimes against humanity" is invoked, with the retort that this is self-serving hyperbole. In between, the narrative has mutated: sectors that denounced hoaxes in March 2020 are the same ones now talking about a "plandemic" and experimental vaccines. Denialism changed sides, but distrust of institutions remains exactly where it was on day one.

That is the uncomfortable summary: six years later, Spain knows how many died, but not why. The question is not whether the bicho existed (of course it existed), but whether the response was proportionate. The answer, like almost everything in this story, remains pending.

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