Terrifying footage from inside a Spanish hospital shows coughing coronavirus patients lying on the floor of a corridor as they wait to be seen by medical staff.
The shocking clip shows some coughing deeply as a medic stands nearby and some of those on the floor appear to be hooked up to oxygen tanks.
The scenes were reportedly recorded at the Infanta Leonor Hospital and the Severo Ochoa de Leganes Hospital in the Spanish capital Madrid, according to El Mundo.
The video which was reported locally was shared online to urge people to follow social distancing measures being enforced in countries across the world.
Spain’s death toll jumped to more than 2,000 today – a 27 per cent increase – with 33,089 cases of the infection now recorded.
The country is in danger of becoming the new epicentre of the outbreak in Europe, with Italy’s latest figures offering some hope that the crisis there could start to ease.
Spain’s deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo is among those awaiting urgent test results today after he was taken to hospital with a respiratory infection on Sunday.
People can be heard coughing in the packed corridor as other patients sit on the rows of chairs
The scenes were reportedly recorded at the Infanta Leonor Hospital and the Severo Ochoa de Leganes Hospital in the Spanish capital Madrid and show patients lying on the floor coughing
In the first clip, reportedly recorded at the Infanta Leonor Hospital, patients can be seen lying on the floors of the corridors with face masks on and bedsheets below them.
People can be heard coughing in the packed corridor as other patients sit on the rows of chairs.
A second clip shows a health worker walking through the packed corridors of the Severo Ochoa de Leganes Hospital, with patients lining the corridors on gurneys, with many heard coughing too.
Local newspaper El Mundo report the second hospital confirmed they ‘are not admitting more patients’ as they are at ‘maximum capacity’.
The newspaper report representative for the General Union of Workers Javier Garcia said the situation at the hospital is ‘dramatic’ with the emergency ward ‘at three times its capacity’ and ‘people without a bed, sitting on plastic chairs for more than 30 hours’.
Garcia added: ‘This morning I saw a person on the floor between two seats. Emotionally, this is terrible.’
Mercedes, a representative for the Workers’ Commissions union, said that on Friday morning there had been 240 people in the hospital’s emergency ward when the capacity is 80 patients.
Jorge Mora, a representative of the healthcare union SATSE said that Infanta Leonor hospital seen in the first clip is ‘at maximum capacity’ too with more than 500 patients admitted for COVID 19, with 300 confirmed and 230 under observation.
The hospital has reportedly begun to move patients with ‘critical criteria’ to the Colon Hotel where a medical space has been created to relieve hospitals of numbers.
Madrid has also converted a major conference centre named IFEMA into a temporary hospital to deal with the wave of patients flooding the healthcare system.
This photo, believed to have been taken at the Severo Ochoa de Leganes Hospital in Madrid shows patients on the floor
A second clip shows a health worker walking through the packed corridors of the Severo Ochoa de Leganes Hospital, with patients lining the corridors on gurneys, with many heard coughing too
It comes as yesterday the Spanish government sought to extend until April 11 a state of emergency that it has imposed to try to control Europe’s second-worst outbreak of coronavirus.
Some regions on Sunday also asked for harsher confinement measures to combat the pandemic.
‘We are at war,’ Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told a news briefing, calling on Europe to launch a massive, coordinated public investment programme like the post World War Two Marshall Plan.
The nationwide state of emergency, announced on March 14 and intended to last 15 days, bars people from all but essential outings.
An extension would need to be approved by parliament but that is guaranteed after the main opposition party, the conservative People’s Party, said it would support it, giving enough votes to Sanchez’s Socialist Party and its far-left government coalition partner Unidas Podemos.
Sanchez said he hoped all parties would support the extension. It would be the first time in Spain’s four-decade democracy that a state of emergency would be prolonged.
Parliament has a scheduled plenary session on Wednesday.
Sanchez praised Spaniards’ commitment to home confinement, and defended the need to extend the state of emergency, saying,
‘We hope that with this so drastic, dramatic and hard measure… we can bend the coronavirus’ curve’.
Spain’s 17 regions manage health care but, under the state of emergency, the government is centralizing all decisions, prompting some such as Madrid to suggest that the government is slowing down the arrival of equipment from abroad.
Sanchez held on Sunday a video call with all the regional leaders but that did not prevent some regions, such as Catalonia and Murcia, from insisting later in demanding a total shutdown of all economic activity except essential services.
Murcia’s government even issued an order in that regard, which was later rebuffed by Spain’s Health Ministry, arguing it was the only authorised to take such a decision.
The Spanish Armed Forces will expand its role in dealing with the outbreak by moving patients to less overcrowded hospitals, transporting health equipment and helping Spaniards abroad return home, Sanchez said.
Health workers prepare to receive their first patients at a temporary hospital at the Ifema exhibition complex in Madrid yesterday
Two health workers prepare beds at the Madrid exhibition centre, which will have 5,500 beds and a makeshift intensive care unit