CHIARI, Italy (AP) – The 160-bed hospital in the city of Chiari in the Po River Valley no longer has room for patients affected by the highly contagious variant of COVID-19 first identified in Britain, which hospitals in the province of Northern Brescia in Italy. high warning.
History repeated itself one year after Lombardy became the center of the pandemic in Italy was a morbid realization for dr. Gabriele Zanolini, who runs the COVID-19 ward at M. Mellini Hospital in the once walled city that retains its medieval circular street. pattern.
“You know there are patients in the emergency, and you do not know where to place them,” Zanolini told the Associated Press.
‘It’s scary for me not to be able to respond to people who need to be treated. The most difficult moment is to find ourselves in a state of emergency again after so much time. ”
The increase in the British variety filled 90% of the hospital beds in the province of Brescia, which borders both the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna areas, as Italy exceeded the grim threshold of 100,000 pandemics on Monday. first in the West.
While Zanolini was able to provide a safety valve to hit Bergamo hard during last weekend’s deadly boom, and in the autumn to Milan and Varese, he now has to ask hospitals elsewhere in the region to take virus patients he himself cannot recognize.
New measures are being considered again in Rome to reduce the increase in new cases attributed to virus variants, including those identified in South Africa and Brazil. With the British variant prevailing in Italy and of school-going children and adolescents being chased by families, Lombardy has again placed all schools at a distance, as well as several regions in the south where the health care system is more fragile.
In this boom, patients in the COVID-19 ward at Chiari Hospital are increasingly becoming family members – men and women, fathers and sons – Zanolini said. And unlike previous nails, the average 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,” Zanolini said of the younger patients, noting that mortality among the elderly remains high.
Despite months of renewed restrictions starting in October, Italy’s death toll remains stubbornly high – several hundred a day. It was above 100,000 this week, the second highest in Europe after Britain.
The new Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Draghi, is concentrating on vaccines to help the country recover from pandemic, and this week promises a video message to significantly strengthen the campaign in the coming weeks.
“Everyone should do their part to limit this spread of this virus,” Draghi said on Tuesday. “But above all, the government must be on its side. It should rather try to do more every day. The pandemic has not yet been defeated. ”
The vaccine is the only way out, Zanolini agrees. He sees all around him that people have grown tired of the constraints, and that they become relaxed – too relaxed – with gatherings, distance and masks.
“We are worried because we do not see an end. It looks like the tunnel is still very long, ”said Zanolini. “We are hit by another wave, and we are very tired.”
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