CHIARI, Italy (AP) – The 160-bed hospital in the city of Chiari in the Po River Valley has no room for patients affected by the highly contagious variant of COVID-19 first identified in Britain and those hospitals in the northern province of Brescia in Italy are a big alarm.
That history repeated a year after Lombardy became the epicenter of the Italian pandemic was a sickening realization for Dr. Gabriele Zanolini, who runs the COVID-19 ward at M. street. pattern.
“You know there are patients in the emergency room, and you don’t know where to put them,” Zanolini told The Associated Press.
“This is fear for me, not being able to respond to people who need to be treated. The most difficult moment is to find ourselves in a state of emergency after so much time. “
The UK variant rise filled 90% of hospital beds in the province of Brescia, bordering both the regions of Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, as Italy crossed the stark threshold of 100,000 pandemic deaths on Monday, marking a year of Italy’s draconian shutdown on Wednesday, the first in the West.
Although Zanolini was able to provide a safety valve to the hard-hit Bergamo during last spring’s deadly wave, and to Milan and Varese in the fall, he now has to ask hospitals elsewhere in the region to take in virus patients he yourself cannot admit it.
In Rome, new measures are again being considered to reduce the proliferation of new cases attributed to virus variants, including those identified in South Africa and Brazil. With the British variant common in Italy racing from school-aged children and adolescents to families, Lombardy has once again put all schools in distance learning, as well as several regions of the south where the health care system is more vulnerable.
In this wave, patients in the COVID-19 ward of Chiari Hospital are increasingly relatives – husbands and wives, fathers and sons – Zanolini said. And unlike previous peaks, the mean age has dropped, with many of the virus patients needing respiratory assistance between the ages of 45 and 55. “However, we have seen that they respond well to treatment,” said Zanolini of the younger patients, noting that mortality remains high among the elderly.
Despite months of renewed restrictions from October, the death toll in Italy remains stubbornly high – several hundred a day. It hit 100,000 this week, the second highest in Europe after Great Britain.
Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, is focusing on vaccines to help the country emerge from a pandemic and pledges in a video message this week to significantly intensify the campaign in the coming weeks.
“Everyone must do their part to contain this spread of this virus,” Draghi said on Tuesday. “But above all, the government must contribute. Rather, it should try to do more every day. The pandemic has not yet been overcome. “
The vaccine is the only way out, Zanolini agrees. He sees all around him that people have become tired of the restrictions and become relaxed – to relax – with gatherings, distance and masks.
“We worry because we see no end. It looks like the tunnel is still very long, ”said Zanolini. “We are hit by a new wave and we are very tired.”
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