Belgium’s response offers a gruesome twist: Paramedics and hospitals sometimes flatly denied care to elderly people, even as hospital beds sat unused.

Weeks earlier, the virus had overwhelmed hospitals in Italy. Determined to prevent that from happening in Belgium, the authorities shunned and all but ignored nursing homes. But while Italian doctors said they were forced to ration care to the elderly because of shortages of space and equipment, Belgium’s hospital system never came under similar strain.

Even at the height of the outbreak in April, when Ms. Balducci was turned away, intensive-care beds were no more than about 55 percent full.

“They wouldn’t accept old people,” Ms. Doyen said. “They had space, and they didn’t want them.”

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Médecins Sans Frontières dispatched teams of experts more accustomed to working in war-hardened countries. On March 25, when a team arrived at Val des Fleurs, a public nursing home a few miles from European Union headquarters, they were greeted by the stale smell of disinfectant and an eerie stillness, pierced only by the song of a caged canary.

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