Over the past 24 hours, 627 people in Italy have lost their lives following coronavirus infection.
It is the largest number of dead in a single day in the country since the corona epidemic seized Italy.
A total of 4,032 corona patients in Italy are now dead. Just five days ago that figure was less than half that. Already yesterday, Italy became the country in the world that has recorded the most corona-related deaths – also more than in China.
Lombardy in northern Italy is particularly affected. In that region, 2,549 deaths have been recorded and 22,264 cases of infection have been recorded.
The situation in Northern Italy is so dire that during the night to yesterday, the army drove 15 trucks with corpses out of the city of Bergamo, because the crematorium in Bergamo could not keep up with the many coronavirus victims.
At the same time, the Attorney General of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, said that the region’s doctors and nurses are close to breaking point:
I’m worried that they can succumb physically and mentally because if they were to succumb to it would really be a disaster.
The situation in the country’s hospitals is so catastrophic that doctors have to make choices they would otherwise only make in war-like situations.
Doctors must choose between patients
In some hospitals, they have set out guidelines stating that patients with ‘best chance of successful treatment and most hope for life’ should have room in the intensive care units.
If you have a 99-year-old patient, it is a patient with many diseases. If you get a young person who needs to be intubated and you only have a respirator, then you don’t start beating or crown, Italian surgeon Carlo Vitelli tells NRP.
At the same time, staff at the country’s hospitals are warning that they do not have the proper equipment to protect themselves from being infected with coronavirus, and several employees have been hospitalized in intensive care units.
“We are like soldiers at the front line, but without weapons,” Paola Pedrini, president of the Association of General Practitioners in Italy, told Politico.
