Seen from the glass gallery on the first floor, where the administrative offices are located, the Isabel-Zendal hospital looks like a patient shed. This is a deliberate choice for this “pandemic hospital”, inaugurated on December 11, 2020 in the middle of a huge wasteland in the new district of Valdebebas, near Madrid airport, between the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Real Madrid training center.
At the entrance, no sick or families of patients: we arrive here by ambulance, after being transferred from one of the twenty-three hospitals in the Madrid region, and we also leave by ambulance to our hospital of origin. As for visits, they are not authorized.
Because the Zendal – named after the first nurse to embark on an international expedition at the end of the 18th centurye century to bring the smallpox vaccine to the overseas territories of the Spanish Empire – is not a hospital center like the others and is not intended to be: it is a kind of hospital campaign “luxury” entirely devoted to cases of Covid-19, and equipped for example with twelve negative pressure chambers – which prevent the ambient air from escaping.
Each of the three pavilions that make it up extends over 10,000 m2. Two of these vast modular spaces, arranged using movable partitions, are in operation. The third will be put into service if the virulence of the pandemic requires it. The ceiling height is 12 meters, and huge extraction chimneys purify the air fourteen times an hour, to keep the viral load as low as possible. However, the most striking is the alignment of the beds, without the usual privacy of hospital rooms, without the loneliness too, which is often hard for people with Covid-19.
“Lack of privacy”
Each pavilion has eight modules, separated by gender, which in turn have 48 beds, attached to an infirmary control post. For caregivers, the advantages of this configuration are obvious: “Everything is digitized, we have an overview of the patients and when one of them suddenly desaturates, as is often the case with this disease, there is always someone to warn us”, emphasizes Ana Rodriguez, 24, an infirmary assistant from Jaen, Andalusia. In addition, those who are sufficiently fit can walk in the corridors, talk to each other, or even play chess on the tables set up in two bright aisles.
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