ROME (AP) – While the world said goodbye to 2020 – or good freedom – a year in which the pandemic brought billions of hardships and pain, some of those who fought the virus on the front lines, even during the hours cost is past midnight.
In the Casalpalocco Covid 3 hospital on the outskirts of Rome, it appears that doctors and nurses barely registered the new year because they were prone to 100 patients struggling with serious to critical illnesses due to coronavirus infections.
In one guard unit all the beds were except one. Medical staff calmly tended to dispense medicine to patients lying in dimly lit rooms, check breathing machines, and fill out medical records.
“This particular one (New Year’s Eve) is a surreal night, just like Christmas, just like the Epiphany, just like this past Easter and all the other holidays,” said Dr. Paolo Petrassi, the night shift coordinator, said. “These are, let’s say, holidays detached from what the real world once was, as we have known it forever.”
The 53-year-old tells of the experience known to so many people in the medical profession worldwide who have had to treat COVID patients: to constantly monitor patients and manage their condition, each with their own complex problems.
Worldwide, more than 83 million coronavirus infections have been confirmed and more than 1.8 million deaths. Along with the elderly, medical staff were particularly hard hit and struggling to save patients, even though their own colleagues a year ago could hardly be imagined.
“It was all unexpected,” Petrassi told The Associated Press.
Italy was the early center of the pandemic in Europe in the spring. Images of Italian nurses and doctors, exhausted when they briefly removed their protective gear, months later became a bad sign of what would happen to their colleagues in Spain, France, the United States and elsewhere.
Last month, after a summer in which Italy suffered the plague, it again became the country with the highest death toll in Europe. And once again the grim reality is reflected in the eyes of the medical staff of Italy.
“Now we are almost reaching the twelve months of this pandemic, and unfortunately we do not yet have the opportunity to say that it is over,” Petrassi said. “We only have the hope of the mass vaccination that, we hope, will contribute to the control of this ominous phenomenon.”
European regulators approved the first vaccine shortly before Christmas. Countries across the European Union began firing on December 27, but it will be a long time before a significant number of the bloc’s 450 million people are immunized.
Experts believe that at least 60-70% of the population should be vaccinated to prevent the virus from gaining a foothold.
Petrassi hopes the nightmare of COVID will end soon.
“We all live in uncertainty, but at the same time we hope, and we all do our best,” he said. “We use all our professional and physical resources, our knowledge, our conscience and spend time with our families, us and our loved ones’ free time.”
“We are investing it all so that all these efforts are not in vain.”
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