How have the sectors most affected by the pandemic changed?

Dossier Five years with covid Desplega

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How have the sectors most affected by the pandemic changed?

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"Madrid manipulated the Covid data as it does with the waiting lists"

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Five years with Covid: "Many nurses got infected at work and now we are not respected"

BarcelonaThe Covid-19 pandemic turned everything upside down five years ago. The worst health crisis of modern times impacted every sphere of life, shook the world economy and forced us to rethink important areas such as care homes and schools. Five years later, some of these sectors have changed radically, while others have not learned any of the lessons from Covid in 2020.

Transforming the healthcare system

Five years ago, healthcare systems around the world were not prepared for a pandemic like the one caused by Covid-19. Despite warnings from scientists and public health experts, hospitals collapsed and many people died despite the overexertion of healthcare professionals. The health crisis highlighted the lack of workers and the need to transform the Catalan public health system. It also made clear that a pandemic plan was needed to avoid a new setback like the one in 2020, as well as having a robust Public Health Agency capable of detecting any threat.

Now, five years later, the problems remain the same and some have even worsened. The lack of healthcare professionals is one of the great challenges of the system and there is no prospect of increasing and adapting staff to current needs. There has been improvement in the area of detection of new infections and viruses and the traceability of transmission chains, but the agency remains stuck and waiting to be deployed. The Spanish government plans to present its pandemic plan in 2025, and the Ministry of Health has set out to make the changes that the health system has been demanding for so long. However, at the moment these are only political commitments, and there is no timetable for the materialization of these changes.

The pharmaceutical companies that made a fortune

Before 2020, Pfizer and BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Moderna were mostly unknown names, but with the arrival of the pandemic their popularity exploded. They are the three pharmaceutical companies that led the race to get a vaccine against Covid, something that has already triggered the value of their shares in November of that year, when Pfizer and Moderna announced high effectiveness. That same week, the euphoria moved to the parquet floors and the European Commission (EC) announced a contract for the advance purchase of 300 million doses. Now, five years later, the deal is still going strong: a few days ago Europe announced the purchase of vaccines from Moderna against Covid worth 146 million euros.

The commercialization of vaccines had a major impact on the profit and loss accounts of these companies, especially for those that had just registered losses in 2019, such as Moderna or BioNTech. Specifically, the five companies behind the most successful vaccines (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, BioNTech and AstraZeneca) Together they earned more than 28 billion euros in 2021, driven mainly by the first two.

Decline in educational level

Six years later –not years– the Catalan education system has no visible after-effects of having gone through a pandemic like the one in 2020. There are no masks, except when someone has a cold, and there is no trace of the lists of infected students, confined groups or closed schools and institutes. However, the hustle and bustle that those months entailed in the classrooms has caused consequences that still mark the reality of the classrooms.

The fact that in a very short time it was decided to close the schools to avoid contagions made evident one of the shortcomings of that time among the students: the lack of computers and resources to be able to continue learning from home, a scenario that had never had to be foreseen. All this culminated in a significant loss of class hours, but it also meant that one of the reactions to deal with it was to accelerate the digitalisation of the educational world.

Now, five years after the crisis and after the Ministry of Education has invested 1.6 billion euros at state level in digitalizing classrooms, for a few months now Catalonia has put on the table the option of taking steps back banning mobile phones in all educational centers, but also opening up the possibility of restricting screens among the youngest at school.

Now, the main consequence of covid in the educational field has undoubtedly been the overall decline in the academic level of students. Since 2020, the results In mathematics, 4th year ESO students have dropped by 6 points and are below 70 out of 100, the threshold that Educació considers "optimal". The sharp decline has also been evident in knowledge of the Catalan language, which in the last academic year recorded the lowest results since 2012, although in this case other factors have also influenced, such as theIncrease in newly arrived Catalans or the loss of social use of the Catalan language.

The drop in level has also been reflected in international tests: according to the latest PIRLS study, after the pandemic, Catalan students They had lost almost a year in reading comprehension. and, according to the PISA tests, Catalonia had lost more than one school year in mathematics, science and reading comprehension.

However, as shown by several international studies and also Catalan data, the post-pandemic has further exacerbated inequalities within the classroom. In the last five years, the detection of vulnerable students in Catalonia has multiplied by five and, at this time, in the country there are more than 412,000 children under 16 years of age at risk of poverty. This vulnerability has a direct impact on studies, since, according to an analysis by Save the Children and Esade, poor Catalan students are six times more likely to repeat than rich ones.

No research in residences

Five years later, normality was imposed on Catalan nursing homes. Gone were the restrictive protocols that further aggravated a health crisis that ended the lives of 8,000 residents. The surprise of the new virus, the lack of hygiene material and the staff shortage multiplied the infections, but it also helped to ensure that there was no coordination between health services and nursing homes: there were hardly any doctors or nurses working there and, in the first weeks of the pandemic, three quarters of the deaths occurred in the elderly.

The pandemic highlighted the fragility of the system and raised awareness of the need for a change of model, taking into account the entry into old age of the generation of the baby boom and the will of the majority to stay at home. This poses a challenge for the public administration because it must propose home care services to support autonomy while making residences places more similar to living at home for the severely dependent.

Recently, the Government has given the green light to the Agency for Integrated Social and Health Care (Agaiss), an entity proposed in the previous legislature that must allow residents to be cared for by health professionals from public health centres like any other citizen.

The other great difficulty of the sector is to reduce the waiting times to access public places in residences and to be able to respond to the needs of families, especially when dependency comes suddenly. The delays for degree evaluations are extended for months, there is a lack of places in day centres, more staff and hours of home care, etc.

Five years later, there has been no investigation into what went wrong in the nursing homes. Parliament tried to do so, but political alliances reduced the commission to a working group which, after around forty witness and expert appearances, concluded that there were many errors during the spring of 2020, but none attributable to any specific person responsible. The deputies of the PSC, ERC and Junts signed a document in which they spoke of a lack of coordination and confusion in the nursing homes during the first few days due to a lack of foresight and various instructions that provided little service. They also pointed out the poor inspections in the nursing homes, due to the small staff of 29 professionals who often notify the management of the centres before going. Among the deficiencies to be corrected, the report of the Parliament (rejected by the CUP and the Comuns) indicated the increase in the ratios of professionals and putting an end to the precarious working conditions of this staff.

For the relatives of the residents, the conclusions of the Parliament were once again a disappointment in their demands for justice. As is the fact that, at this time, none of the three cases that have managed to reach the courts have been judged. The most advanced is that of the 64 deaths in the Filella de Tremp residence, still in the investigation phase. The relatives who entered due to lack of information described the scene as "the house of horrors", with dead people tied to the beds.

Goodbye to teleworking

The crisis caused by the pandemic meant that, for the first time, millions of homes around the world were converted into makeshift offices. Before Covid-19, according to the INE's Active Population Survey, only 4.8% of Spaniards normally worked (or more than half of the days of the week) from home. In Catalonia, this same statistic shot up to 17.2% in the second quarter of 2020 with the hardest part of the lockdown. However, five years later, the percentage of employees who normally work from home has dropped to 7.7%, while 6.2% do so occasionally. For 84% of Catalan workers, nothing has changed and they continue to always go to work in person. While companies such as Amazon or Goldman Sachs have backtracked and asked their staff to return to the office, there are others that have opted for a hybrid model and maintain some days of teleworking. Civil servants of the Generalitat, for example, have the right to a maximum of two days per week, but the Illa government eliminated this option for senior officials, which caused discontent among managers.

Beyond the adoption of teleworking, temporary employment regulation files (ERTO) were revealed during the pandemic as the saving mechanism to avoid the destruction of more jobs, when factories and industries had to stop their activity overnight.

Tension in world trade

Covid-19 and the lockdowns, which were unbalanced by geographical areas, created tensions in international transport, especially maritime transport, and in supply chains. Companies opted, in some cases, to relocate production or at least to look for suppliers in closer markets. The World Trade Organization (WTO) noted in a document that the changes in the structure of trade caused by the pandemic in a single year were of a similar magnitude to those that usually occur over a period of four to five years.

At the end of 2021, considerable imbalances prevailed between trading partners and products, and not all the accumulated losses from the previous sharp declines were recovered. And the imbalances have continued since then due to the energy crisis resulting from the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East, which has largely modified maritime routes, especially passage through the Suez Canal, and made transport more expensive.

And in the industrial field, the aspiration to relocate was relaxed with the recovery in 2022, but the strength of China has made policies reconsidered, especially in Europe, to gain competitiveness against the United States and the Asian giant. The so-called Draghi plan establishes that some 800 billion euros will be needed to boost strategic industries, such as technology and chips.