07 December,2020 08:23 AM IST | Madrid | Agencies
A woman waves goodbye to her 91-year-old mother after visiting her at nursing home in Barcelona, Spain. File pic/AP
As the two mortuary workers pushed a stretcher with a bagged corpse out of the room, the elderly man in the adjacent bed briefly awakened from his dementia. "Is he dead?" he muttered, extending his arm, trying to touch his roommate for the last time.
Reflecting on a scene repeated too many times, one of the workers, Manel Rivera, despaired at the growing number of elderly people dying as the coronavirus resurges. "The sad thing is," he said of the surviving man in the Barcelona nursing home, "in a few days we'll probably come back for him."
In response, Portugal has deployed military units to train nursing home staff in disinfection. In France, where at least 5,000 institutionalised elderly have died in the past month, and in Germany and Italy, where the summer respite has been followed by an upward turn since September, visits by relatives to nursing homes are being restricted again or banned altogether.
Most countries are ramping up screening of workers and residents, trying to prevent spread by asymptomatic virus carriers. In Spain, nursing home coronavirus deaths have been climbing for two months. They now make up roughly half of all new daily fatalities, a similar share as in March and April.
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