CHIARI, Italy (AP) – The 160-bed hospital in the town of Chiari in the Po River Valley no longer has room for patients affected by the highly contagious version of COVID-19 first identified in the UK, which has put hospitals in northern Italy , province of Brescia maximum alert.
This story is repeated a year after Lombardy became the epicenter of the Italian pandemic, it was a disgusting achievement for Dr. Gabriele Zanolini, who heads the COVID-19 ward of M. Mellini Hospital in the walled city that once maintained its medieval circular street. model.
“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 an anguish for me, because I can’t respond to the people who need to be treated. The most difficult moment is to find ourselves in a state of emergency, after so long. ”
The growth of the UK variant has filled 90% of hospital beds in the province of Brescia, on the border with both the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna regions, as Italy has crossed the grim threshold of 100,000 pandemics dead on Monday and marks its one-year anniversary. on Wednesday of Italy’s draconian blockade first in the West.
While Zanolini has managed to provide a safety valve to hit Bergamo hard during the deadly rise last spring and for Milan and Varese in the autumn, he now has to ask hospitals in other regions to take patients with the virus he himself he can’t admit them.
New measures are being reconsidered in Rome to reduce the increase in new cases attributed to virus variants, including those identified in South Africa and Brazil. Given the UK variant, which is predominant in Italy and which runs courses from school-age children and adolescents to families, Lombardy has once again put all distance learning schools, as well as several southern regions, where the health system is more fragile.
In this growth, patients in the COVID-19 ward of Chiari Hospital are more and more family members – husbands and wives, fathers and sons – said Zanolini. And unlike previous peaks, the average age has decreased, with many patients with the virus needing help to breathe between the ages of 45 and 55. “I have seen, however, that they respond well to treatment,” Zanolini said of younger patients, noting that mortality remains high among the elderly.
Despite months of renewed restrictions since October, the death toll in Italy remains stubbornly high – a few hundred a day. It rose to 100,000 this week, the second largest in Europe after the UK.
Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, is focusing on vaccines to help the country emerge from the pandemic, promising 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 Tuesday. “But, above all, the government must be on its side. Rather, he should try to do more each day. The pandemic is not yet defeated. “
The vaccine is the only way out, he agrees with Zanolini. He sees around him that people are tired of restrictions and relaxes – too relaxed – with meetings, distances and masks.
“We are worried because we do not see an end. It seems that the tunnel is still very long “, said Zanolini. “We are hit by another wave and we are very tired.”
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