When Spain's king Felipe VI visited the Ifema trade fair pavilions in Madrid last Thursday, converted into an emergency hospital for coronavirus-infected patients and presented as the largest hospital centre in Spain in the fight against the pandemic - with 5,500 beds - he could scarcely think that his words declaring that it was "something we can all be very proud of" and that "it will go down in history as one of the images we will all remember over the years", would be invalidated within four days. On Monday, to be exact, health workers at the field hospital issued protests about the conditions in which they were being made to work, wearing plastic rubbish bags, butcher's aprons and with patients crammed in.
Some of the assigned workers and volunteers, from what they have said on social media, have even refused to go to work unless better protective measures are provided to prevent them from getting infected. The images released are extremely worrying, with the emphasis being placed on the fact that the hospital network is saturated and that the likelihood that Ifema healthcare staff will be infected rapidly is high. When you are more aware of public relations than everything else related to the pandemic, the risk of this happening is great. But last Thursday, an image had to be found for the front pages of the next day's newspapers.
It is certainly not easy, in the current circumstances, to separate PR from news, information from propaganda. There is no government that does not fall into this mistake, thinking that the public will end up swallowing everything it is fed. And that, to a large extent, is no longer so. When this Monday afternoon I saw ministers Margarita Robles (defence) and José Luis Ábalos (development) appearing urgently at a press conference, I thought there was something important happening. I immediately realized that more than a press conference it was a political rally and that there was no news.
Perhaps this is what Spain's single command really consists of: a situation in which no one can do anything and the few who can, spend the day talking and talking. Let's see if now it turns out that information in the 21st century is much more deficient than at the end of the last century.