CASTELBUONO, Sicily (CN) — In his years as a mountain climber, he's learned to not look up toward the summit in expectation, anxiously hoping the peak is closer. His mantra is to keep his eyes on the ground and put one foot in front of the other.
Now, surrounded by a seemingly never-ending wave of sickness and death, Antonio Saiz, a 43-year-old family doctor on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic in Madrid, is relying on the same logic.
“Everyone in Spain is following the news and everyone is expecting the peak when the famous curve is going to flatten,” Dr. Saiz said over the telephone to me, a reporter in lockdown in Italy. “That information is useless for me in my daily routines. I decided a few days ago I don't want to be updated on the numbers.”
I am fascinated, and listen.
“I try not to look at the top. If I try to look to the top, I will get desperate,” he says in perfect English. “So that is how I am doing it now. I look at my colleagues, I focus on my work, because I cannot see the end.”
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Dr. Saiz works in a primary care center in the heart of Madrid and for the past month he and his colleagues have been plunged into a nightmare of mounting patients, ghastly home visits where people are dying in their beds, telephone lines full of desperate calls, medical workers falling sick, and doctors and nurses having to stretch their supplies because they lack vital protective equipment.
“We are suffering so much,” he said on a recent April morning, preparing for another day of human misery that even he, trained as a doctor, finds hard to fathom. “You cannot imagine this.”
Madrid, a city of 3.3 million, is the epicenter of Spain's outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 1 million people and killed more than 50,000 from the respiratory disease known as Covid-19.
More than 4,000 people have died in the Spanish capital since the outbreak began and more than 33,000 people have contracted the virus, making it the hardest hit city outside of Wuhan, China.
The scale of infection is certainly far higher than officially reported, Dr. Saiz said. Doctors and nurses across Madrid are on the telephone with more than 120,000 people suspected of having contracted the virus, yet reporting mild symptoms.
“These people will never know if they are positive or not,” he said. That's because mild cases are not getting tested.
The sheer volume of sick Madrileños’ suffering is staggering.
“In my primary care center, it is like watching four to five hundred people who are exactly the same, suffering the same complications,” Dr. Saiz says. “We are seeing a huge number of ill people every day with the same pattern.”
The disease causes an acute form of pneumonia that quickly exacerbates underlying health problems.
“Its potential of destabilizing chronic diseases — that is where we are our losing our grandparents,” Dr. Saiz says.
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March 2. That was when he had his first confirmed Covid-19 patient, displaying now-familiar symptoms.
Looking back, he believes he had been seeing patients with Covid-19 before that day — the first Monday in March — and treating them as people sick with common colds and flus.
A month later, his world is upside down.
When the outbreak began, there were 13 doctors and 12 nurses at his clinic. Then, five doctors and seven nurses contracted coronavirus. One colleague was hospitalized.
“It's incredible how many colleagues have got this virus,” he says.
About 12,300 Spanish medical workers have contracted the virus, an enormous number representing about 15% of Spain's cases, the highest rate in the world. It's so bad that many primary care centers have been closed because there's no one left to run them. He suspects he may have had it too, but he wasn't tested. All he ever had was a sneeze.
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