Madrid has been one of the centers of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, with more than 8,000 fatalities recorded in the Spanish capital. Yet even this toll obscures the full extent of the tragedy. For in the region’s overwhelmed nursing homes, another 5,500 people have died — users of old-age care services normally excluded from official statistics. As the army moved in to disinfect some of these facilities in late March, Defense Minister Margarita Robles reported that soldiers had discovered elderly residents “totally abandoned” and “residing in extreme conditions” — with some found “dead in their beds.”

Workers in one home, run by multinational service provider DomusVi, alleged that management were intentionally hiding bodies in the center so as to “conceal the true reality” of the outbreak there. In another case, the CCOO union released a video of staff working for French provider Orpea. In it they talk of “cover ups, black-mailing and threats” from the management of one of its homes where there was officially only one case of the virus but in which workers believed sixteen residents had died in an outbreak over a ten-day period.

Decades of privatization and outsourcing have left Madrid with only twenty-five fully publicly run nursing homes (out of a total of 426) — with much of the rest of the sector now dominated by a small number of corporate providers. Chronic understaffing and a lack of resources meant that services were already under huge strain even before the pandemic hit. Speaking to El Pais, Aurelia Jerez, of the pressure group La Marea Residencia, explained that “for many of these [firms] an elderly person is only an asset with which to speculate. The number of staff [they employ] is below the minimum threshold and they are overloaded with work.”