Spain has the third highest number of detected coronavirus cases in the world — and numbers are fast rising. The figures are extremely volatile, and we are currently experiencing exponential increases in both detected infections and deaths, which total 85,195 and 7,340 respectively as of March 29. It is still too early to know if the measures adopted by the Socialist Party–Unidas Podemos (PSOE-UP) coalition government will be able to stop the contagion’s course of growth. But the health crisis is rapidly becoming a multifaceted crisis of Spanish society.

Unlike the United States, Spain does, at least, have a public health system. The constitution passed in 1978 during the democratic transition enshrined such a system, a victory for working-class Spaniards bolstered by a 1989 amendment that guaranteed the right to “universal” treatment. Popular identification with these values has only been strengthened amid the current crisis. Were it not for this public health care, thousands of families would have to choose between letting their loved ones die and sinking into indebtedness and impoverishment. In a situation of multiple contagions, their choices would be limited to choosing which of their debts to pay off. Properly valuing the public health system allows us to understand the damage that neoliberal policies have done to it.

In recent years, many health services have been privatized, not only by the center-right Popular Party (PP), but also by the center-left PSOE and more conservative elements of the pro-independence forces in Catalonia. Although resistance by health workers and patients has contained the privatization process to a degree, the PP in Madrid — the city today at the center of the COVID-19 outbreak — has been especially aggressive in transferring services and resources to private companies. These changes were, as in all neoliberal ideological discourse, supposedly justified in the name of “improvements” and increased efficiency.