quote:

Bergamo, northern Lombardy, is Ground Zero for Italy’s coronavirus crisis. The city has 1,245 positive cases, a number that rose by 248 yesterday. Hospitals are under enormous pressure and doctors are having to make agonising choices about their priorities. In a post on Facebook, Dr Daniele Macchini of the Humanitas Gavazzeni hospital, revealed what frontline workers were facing as he warned against public complacency. His words have been translated and edited for length.

I understand the importance of not generating panic, but the gravity of this situation is not well understood, and I shiver when I hear people saying they don’t care, or complain because they cannot go to the gym or play football.

I myself was shocked to see the total reorganisation of the hospital over the past week: the wards slowly emptied, non-urgent activities interrupted, the intensive care unit given over to make room for more beds.

I remember how I spent my night shift a week ago nervously waiting for a call from the microbiology department waiting for the response of the test on the first suspected case in our hospital, and thinking of the possible consequences for us.

If I think again about that night, now that I see what is going on, my anxiety at a single case seems ludicrous. It is reductive to call the current situation dramatic, but I have no other words. The war has literally exploded and the battles are relentless, day and night.

People show up at the hospital one after the other. They have nothing like the problems caused by seasonal flu. They can’t breathe, they need oxygen.

There aren’t many therapies for this virus. It depends mainly on your body.

What we can do is simply support the body when it can’t keep it up any more. Now we dramatically need those beds. All the emptied wards are being filled again at an incredible pace.

The boards with the name of the patients, with different colours for each different units, are all red and the diagnosis is always the same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. There are no longer surgeons, urologists, orthopaedists – we are all just doctors trying to fight this tsunami that crashed on us. The number of cases is rising, with 15 or 20 new patients every day for the same reason.

The results of the tests come one after the other: positive, positive, positive. Suddenly, the emergency room is on the brink of collapse.

The war has literally exploded and the battles are relentless, day and night

The symptoms are always the same: high temperature and shortness of breath, high temperature and cough, shortness of breath.

Some need to be intubated and sent to the emergency care unit already. For others, it’s just too late…

The staff are literally exhausted. Social life is suspended for us. For almost two weeks, I voluntarily decided not to see my son or family members, for fear of infecting them and consequently infecting elderly relatives with other health problems.

So, you should be patient too, if you can’t go to the theatre, museums or to the gym. Try to have mercy for all the older people you could exterminate.

We have no alternative [but to be here]. It is our job... in the end we only try to be useful for everyone. Now, try to do it too.

With our actions, we influence the life and death of a few dozen people.

With your actions, you could influence many more.

quote:

Hospitals in the locked-down Italian region of Lombardy are beginning to run out of beds as the country recorded its highest day-on-day rise in deaths from coronavirus.

Twenty days into its outbreak, Italy is grappling to contain the spread of the virus and find space and beds in intensive care units, which are dwindling day by day. To manage the emergency, the sick are being placed in operating rooms or in hospital corridors.

“I am very concerned,” said Prof Massimo Galli, the director of infectious diseases at Sacco hospital in Milan. “The pressure on hospitals in Lombardy these days is enormous. I am very, very worried about the impact the virus will have on our health system.”

quote:

The number of deaths from coronavirus in Italy rose from 366 to 463 on Monday, according to the head of the civil protection agency. The total number of cases in Italy rose by 24% to 9,172, and of those originally infected, 724 had fully recovered. Some 733 people were in intensive care against a previous total of 650.

There are about 500 available beds for intensive care in Lombardy’s public health sphere, with another 160 in private care facilities. Despite a massive effort to locate additional space there are still not enough.

The emergency commissioner and civil protection chief, Angelo Borrelli, announced that 13 patients had been transferred or were on the way to neighbouring regions for their care.

Negative-pressure isolation rooms, designed to contain airborne contaminants, are needed to treat coronavirus properly, to protect doctors and medical technicians from contracting the virus from the patients in their care.

“Just a small portion of the patients affected by Covid-19 in Lombardy are hospitalised in negative pressure rooms,” said Galli. “The majority is not, and this is a dangerous problem because it can lead to transmission to other patients and medical staff throughout an entire hospital.”

Authorities in Lombardy are attempting to free up beds as quickly as possible. According to new guidelines, if a patient infected with Covid-19 has been without a fever for three days and appears to be getting better, then he or she will be released from intensive care and placed in a dedicated rehabilitative pulmonary ward for coronavirus patients.

“Beds in intensive care units and in hospitals in general must be freed quickly to make room for more patients,” the health minister for the Lombardy region, Angelo Garra, told the Corriere della Sera.

Dozens of doctors have contracted the virus. The government has allocated €600m (£522m) to recruit 20,000 doctors and nurses.

There is a risk that the kind of pressure on hospitals experienced in Lombardy will spread to the south of the country after thousands of panic-stricken people travelled there on trains, buses and in their cars as news of spread of the impending government lockdown in the north.

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
Is it real? Is someone just making it up?

Impossible to know.

This one has some legitimacy, given that it's in a relatively major paper (The Telegraph)

quote:

Bergamo, northern Lombardy, is Ground Zero for Italy’s coronavirus crisis. The city has 1,245 positive cases, a number that rose by 248 yesterday. Hospitals are under enormous pressure and doctors are having to make agonising choices about their priorities. In a post on Facebook, Dr Daniele Macchini of the Humanitas Gavazzeni hospital, revealed what frontline workers were facing as he warned against public complacency. His words have been translated and edited for length.

I understand the importance of not generating panic, but the gravity of this situation is not well understood, and I shiver when I hear people saying they don’t care, or complain because they cannot go to the gym or play football.

I myself was shocked to see the total reorganisation of the hospital over the past week: the wards slowly emptied, non-urgent activities interrupted, the intensive care unit given over to make room for more beds.

I remember how I spent my night shift a week ago nervously waiting for a call from the microbiology department waiting for the response of the test on the first suspected case in our hospital, and thinking of the possible consequences for us.

If I think again about that night, now that I see what is going on, my anxiety at a single case seems ludicrous. It is reductive to call the current situation dramatic, but I have no other words. The war has literally exploded and the battles are relentless, day and night.

People show up at the hospital one after the other. They have nothing like the problems caused by seasonal flu. They can’t breathe, they need oxygen.

There aren’t many therapies for this virus. It depends mainly on your body.

What we can do is simply support the body when it can’t keep it up any more. Now we dramatically need those beds. All the emptied wards are being filled again at an incredible pace.

The boards with the name of the patients, with different colours for each different units, are all red and the diagnosis is always the same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. There are no longer surgeons, urologists, orthopaedists – we are all just doctors trying to fight this tsunami that crashed on us. The number of cases is rising, with 15 or 20 new patients every day for the same reason.

The results of the tests come one after the other: positive, positive, positive. Suddenly, the emergency room is on the brink of collapse.

The war has literally exploded and the battles are relentless, day and night

The symptoms are always the same: high temperature and shortness of breath, high temperature and cough, shortness of breath.

Some need to be intubated and sent to the emergency care unit already. For others, it’s just too late…

The staff are literally exhausted. Social life is suspended for us. For almost two weeks, I voluntarily decided not to see my son or family members, for fear of infecting them and consequently infecting elderly relatives with other health problems.

So, you should be patient too, if you can’t go to the theatre, museums or to the gym. Try to have mercy for all the older people you could exterminate.

We have no alternative [but to be here]. It is our job... in the end we only try to be useful for everyone. Now, try to do it too.

With our actions, we influence the life and death of a few dozen people.

With your actions, you could influence many more.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...-tsunami-crashed-us/