CHIARI, Italy (AP) – The 160-bed hospital in the town of Chiari, in the Po River valley, no longer has space for patients affected by the highly contagious variant of COVID-19, first identified in Britain, which placed hospitals in the province of Brescia, in northern Italy, high alert.
This story was repeating itself a year after Lombardy became the epicenter of Italy’s pandemic, it was a sickening perception for Dr. Gabriele Zanolini, who runs the COVID-19 infirmary at M. Mellini Hospital in the once walled city that maintains its street medieval circular pattern.
“You know that 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, not being able to meet the people who need to be treated. The most difficult time is to find ourselves in a state of emergency again, after so long. “
The UK’s variant increase filled 90% of hospital beds in the province of Brescia, bordering the regions of Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, while Italy crossed the dismal limit of 100,000 pandemic deaths on Monday and marks the anniversary of a year of Italy’s draconian blockade on Wednesday. first in the West.
While Zanolini was able to offer an escape valve to the hard-hit Bergamo during the deadly spike last spring, and to Milan and Varese in the fall, he must now ask hospitals elsewhere in the region to accept patients with viruses that he himself can’t admit.
New measures are again being considered in Rome to contain the increase in new cases attributed to variants of the virus, including those identified in South Africa and Brazil. With the UK variant prevalent in Italy and ranging from schoolchildren and teenagers to families, Lombardy has again placed all schools in distance learning, as well as several regions in the south where the health care system is most fragile.
In this increase, patients in the COVID-19 ward of the Chiari hospital are increasingly members of the family – husbands and wives, parents and children – said Zanolini. And, unlike previous peaks, the average age has dropped, with many of the virus patients needing respiratory assistance between 45 and 55 years of age. “We saw, however, that they respond well to treatment,” said Zanolini of younger patients, noting that mortality remains high among the elderly.
Despite months of new restrictions beginning in October, the death toll in Italy remains stubbornly high – several hundred a day. It reached 100,000 this week, the second largest in Europe after Britain.
Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, is focusing on vaccines to help the country out of the pandemic, promising in a video message this week to intensify the campaign significantly in the coming weeks.
“Everyone must do their part to stop the spread of this virus,” said Draghi on Tuesday. “But, above all, the government must do its part. Instead, you should try to do more each day. The pandemic has not yet been defeated. “
The vaccine is the only way out, agrees Zanolini. He sees around him that people have grown tired of restrictions and are relaxing – too relaxed – with encounters, distances and masks.
“We are concerned because we don’t see an end. It looks like the tunnel is still very long, ”said Zanolini. “We found ourselves hit by another wave and we are very tired.”
___
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak