As the two mortuary workers pushed a stretcher with a bagged corpse out of the room, the elderly man in the adjacent bed briefly awakened from his dementia. "Is he dead?" he muttered, extending his arm, trying to touch his roommate for the last time.

Reflecting on a scene repeated too many times, one of the workers, Manel Rivera, despaired at the growing number of elderly people dying as the coronavirus resurges. "The sad thing is," he said of the surviving man in the Barcelona nursing home, "in a few days we’ll probably come back for him."