Doctors in hard-hit Madrid: 'It's like March in slow motion'

MADRID (AP) — It feels like a flashback. Bilateral pneumonia, a common acute manifestation of the COVID-19 disease, is keeping Spanish intensive care wards busy again. And it's also leaving medical workers who are still recovering from the pandemic's peak with an anxious sense of déja vu.

Foreseeable as it was, the second wave has arrived in Europe earlier than expected, hitting countries with different intensity. In Madrid, for the second time the capital worst hit by coronavirus outbreaks on the continent, doctors and nurses say that authorities are responding, again, too erratically and too late.

“In a way, it’s like the situation in March but in slow motion," said Dr. Carlos Velayos, who works as an intensive care unit physician at the public hospital in suburban Fuenlabrada. The hospital is expanding its ICU capacity from 12 to 24 beds by the end of September, as all of them are currently filling up with coronavirus patients.

With 1,273 patients in ICUs, Spain has as many beds devoted to treat grave patients of COVID-19 as France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy together. And 359 of them are in the Madrid region, which for the past week has accounted for roughly one-third of a national average of 8,200 new infections per day.

Spain has a virus caseload above 600,000, one of the world's highest, and more than 30,000 confirmed deaths for the new virus.

Velayos said that prediction models were telling hospital administrators in Madrid that the some ICU wards could reach peak capacity in the second half of September. But little or nothing has been done to avoid to return to extended shifts among many health professionals that are still recovering from the stress of the pandemic's first wave.

“In March, it was like a nuclear bomb that brought the health system as a whole to a collapse in a matter of...