ROME (AP) – While the world was saying goodbye – or good travel – to 2020, a year in which the pandemic brought suffering and suffering to billions, some of those who have been fighting the virus on the front lines have moved on even as the clock passed midnight.
At Casalpalocco Covid 3 Hospital, just outside Rome, doctors and nurses barely seemed to register the new year as they treated 100 patients battling critical illnesses as a result of coronavirus infections.
In an intensive care ward, everyone, except one of the twelve beds, was occupied. The medical team calmly treated patients in poorly lit rooms, dispensed medication, checked breathing devices and filled out medical records.
“This particular (New Year’s Eve) is a surreal night, just like it was at Christmas, what Epiphany will be like, how Easter was and all other holidays”, said Dr. Paolo Petrassi, coordinator of the night shift. “They are, let’s say, holidays separate from what was once the real world, as we always know it.”
The 53-year-old told the now familiar experience to so many in the medical profession around the world who had to treat patients with COVID: having to constantly monitor patients and control their condition, with each having their own set of complicated problems.
More than 83 million infections with the coronavirus have been confirmed worldwide and more than 1.8 million deaths. Along with the elderly, the medical team was particularly hard hit, struggling to save patients, even when their own colleagues fell ill with a disease that almost no one could have imagined a year ago.
“It was all unexpected,” Petrassi told the Associated Press.
Italy was the initial epicenter of the pandemic in Europe in the spring. Images of Italian nurses and doctors, exhausted by briefly removing protective equipment, became a ominous omen of what would happen to their colleagues in Spain, France, the United States and elsewhere, months later.
Last month, after a summer in which Italy seemed to have lifted the scourge, it was again the country with the highest death toll in Europe. And again, the harsh reality was reflected in the eyes of the medical team in Italy.
“Now we are almost completing 12 months of the pandemic and unfortunately we still have no chance to say that it is over,” said Petrassi. “We only hope for a mass vaccination that, we hope, will help to control this harmful phenomenon.”
European regulators approved the first vaccine just before Christmas. European Union countries started administering vaccines on December 27, but it will be a long time before a considerable number of the bloc’s 450 million inhabitants are immunized.
Experts say at least 60-70% of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent the virus from establishing itself.
Petrassi hopes that the COVID nightmare will be over soon.
“We all live in uncertainty, but at the same time we have hope and we are doing our best,” he said. “We are using all of our professional and physical resources, our knowledge, our conscience, giving up time with our families, free time for us and our loved ones.”
“We are investing all this so that all this effort is not in vain.”
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