ROME – Dr. Carlo Mosca’s online patient assessments describe a loving “humanitarian” who saved countless lives before the coronavirus pandemic hit Italy. Patients and their families praised their loving father, whose hospital in Brescia, northern Italy, was one of the hardest hit during the first wave of the pandemic last March.
Something clearly changed in Mosca as the pandemic progressed. The 47-year-old was arrested this week on two counts of murder, accused of killing weak COVID patients and altering his medical records to free up beds for other patients. Mosca describes the claims as “unfounded”, claiming that the overburdened healthcare system is the reason patients died.
During the early months of the pandemic, Italian doctors were faced with dire decisions when deciding who to give respirators and other supplies to, often deciding who lives or dies based on their chance of survival, essentially leaving the weak to die due to lack of treatment. . But Mosca is accused of taking a step forward and killing the patients himself.
Two patients who died in Mosca’s care, Natale Bassi, 61, and Angelo Paletti, 80, were exhumed last month while the prosecution was building the case against the primary care doctor using text messages among nurses who saw the doctor before loving transform Dr. Jekyll into an ominous Mr. Hyde – though most likely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the human tragedy around him.
The investigating judge of the case suggested that Mosca was the “victim of extreme stress for having to face the growing flow of COVID cases,” according to court documents. “The replication of the extreme conditions that led to his crimes made it likely that he would decide to administer prohibited drugs to the most serious patients to speed up their death, thus falsifying the data contained in their medical records.” Simply by suspending treatment, patients could take weeks or months. By injecting them, the prosecutor wrote, he could release the much-needed beds more quickly.
Authorities are now combing the records of all dead Mosca patients looking for anomalies in their treatments and deaths. They do not rule out the exhumation of more bodies, although most of the people who died during the height of the first wave of the pandemic were cremated.
As the Mosca hospital became overloaded and more than 600 patients with COVID were suddenly in his care, nurses say he started directing them to inject lethal doses of Succinylcholine and Propofol, which are often used to intubate patients, in COVID patients who should never be intubated. Drug use in non-intubated patients causes them to suffocate, according to court documents. During the months of March and April, before a nurse confronted Mosca and threatened to report him, requests for both drugs increased by 70 percent, according to court documents seen by the Daily Beast.
As things got more frantic, nurses began to exchange worrying messages that now constitute the case of the prosecution and at least one confronted him about his mood. “Did he ask you to administer the medications without intubating them?” a nurse wrote. “I’m not killing patients just because he wants to free the beds. This is crazy, ”wrote another.
When the nurses started to refuse Mosca’s orders, he reportedly started to inject the patients in person, asking the nurses to leave him alone with the patients. Prosecutors say he also wrote false terminal diagnoses on patients’ medical records, giving them a more reliable cause of death.
Mosca, who was put on hospital leave, is under house arrest until the start of his trial this spring.