Doctors in Mallorca are calling for a 15-day lockdown to try to lower the mounting pressure on hospitals.
“It’s necessary to confine the population for about two or three weeks to give the Health system some respite and reduce the spread of coronavirus." said Son Espases Hospital, Virologist Jordi Reina and many other Doctors and Medical Teams agree with him.
"A restrictive, brief, home confinement of around two weeks is needed, due to the risk of collapse of the health system," insists the President of the Medical Union of the Balearics, Miguel Lázaro, who warned that around a hundred doctors have already contracted Covid-19 and are unable to work. "The minister should forward the request to the Inter-territorial Health Council.”
“The pandemic is in the hands of the communities,” according to Dr Javier Arranz, Spokesperson for the Regional Committee of Infectious Diseases. “It’s logical that they should have all the tools available to them. It’s not a question of applying the measures from tomorrow, it’s about being able to introduce limitations such as bringing forward the curfew to 20 hours easily, if necessary.”
Over the last few days several Communities have called for modifications to the State of Emergency regulations so that they can either bring forward the curfew or decree strict full or partial lockdowns.
The Inter-territorial Health Council is all set to debate the issue, but any amendment to the decree would have to be approved by the Council of Ministers and validated by the Congress of Deputies.
"As President of the Col·legi de Metges, I already made statements on December 23 asking for a confinement in view of the evolution of the Constitution Weekend holiday and Black Friday, but it was not well received," claims José Manuel Valverde. “Now more voices have emerged from other communities calling for the same thing. We are not talking about 6 months, we’re talking about 15 days to relieve the enormous pressure on hospitals.”
"On Tuesday, I examined 50 patients with other pathologies when there are normally only 30," he added. “Although Mallorca has an incidence rate of 557 cases per 100,000 inhabitants at 14 days and it is already clearly declining, the figures are still high and are offset by the evolution of the pandemic in the rest of the Balearic Islands, but the pressure on hospitals is not improving and the longer we wait to take action, the higher the death toll will be.”
"We should definitely be confined, maybe not for a month or a month and a half but for around two weeks," the Head of Son Espases ICU, Dr Julio Velasco said in an interview at the weekend. "We are still living with the ramifications of the Christmas holidays."
Dr Velasco said there is a “tense calm” at Son Espases Hospital and that the pressure is constantly rising because more people are being admitted every day, “we hope that things will improve in February.”