HORROR pictures show a coronavirus victim’s dead body laying on the floor just inches from another resident in a care home in Spain.
It comes as the nation has been recording around 200 deaths a day throughout November as it feels the brunt of the Covid-19 second wave.
Pictures show the horror impact the virus is having on the elderly as corpse collectors come to remove bodies from their beds in care homes.
And one grim image shows a body wrapped up in bed sheets and bound with straps laying on the floor next to another bed.
Chillingly you can see another person lying in the cot right next to the body at the nursing home in Barcelona, Spain.
“Just the simple fact of going to pick up a body and seeing there is another person, alive, next to them,” mortuary worker Marina Gomez told The Associated Press.
“That is what most gets to me.”
Marina, 28, said they have to disinfect around the mouths, noses and eyes of the dead victims to reduce the risk of contamination.
Morgue workers then wrap the body in the sheets before putting them inside two body bags zipped in opposite directions.
She revealed that many times when they arrive to collect bodies there is only a curtain separating the living from the dead.
Spain suffered one of the worst outbreaks in Europe under the first wave of the pandemic.
Despite the virus easing during the summer the nation is now facing a fresh wave of deaths – even as the daily case count has halved since October.
Marina said the first wave saw a “wartime atmosphere” descend which left Spaniards standing together in solidarity – but now she added people are “numb”.
However her colleague Manel Rivera explained he knows the emotional detachment is needed among the hundreds of deaths.
Rivera said: “Once I put the person in the shroud and close the zipper, I no longer ask myself if she had blond, red or brown hair,”
He added if you spend any time dwelling on the dead you “don’t last long in this job”.
Spain has not hit the highs of daily death toll in March, but the surge in figures has once again led to the corpse collectors finding themselves inudated with work.
“We should have learned something,” Marina said.
“But once we were left to do what we want, we went back to our natural state. We have no memory.”
Roman Ibanez, 38, who has transported bodies for 14 years, told how his work load quadrupled during the outbreak’s darkest weeks.
He said: “It was completely insane. You reached the point that you didn’t know what you were doing. You never took off your suit. It was chaotic.”
One night they went to a nursing home and found half the staff were sick, and half the residents had died.
The team were met by a carer who simply “did not stop crying” as they did their grim work.
“The person on the night shift had left a dead body where it was,” he said.
“She was trying to get someone else to come work, but there was no one.”
Spain is currently seeing around 10,000 cases a day – a drop when compared to a peak of 22,449 on October 27.
Deaths have however remained steady and have not fallen beneath 100 since September, peaking at 435 on November 17.
Madrid is preparing to begin mass vaccinations in January and expect to have covered a substantial part of the population within six months.
However, anger is growing over how the government handled the crisis as the Spain’s top doctors called for the head of the coronavirus task force to be sacked.
Fernando Simon, the head of Spain’s coordination centre for health emergencies and alerts, faced calls for his resignation from the general medical council, which represents Spain’s 52 medical colleges.
He was criticised after he appeared to make remarks which blamed doctors for some coronavirus infections in the first wave.
Spain has recorded a total of 1.6million cases and 43,131 deaths, the second highest total infection count in Europe behind France.
Meanwhile, the nations’ sovereign King Felipe VI is now in quarantine after coming into close contact with an individual with coronavirus.
