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Italy has already been severely affected by the corona virus, now the second wave is sweeping away. The government wants to counter this with drastic measures.
San Camillo-Forlanini is a large and venerable hospital with modern facilities in the center of Rome. Those who enter there need not fear long waiting times, the clinic says on its elegant website. Urgent cases are treated in the emergency room in 15 minutes, even patients without any urgency would be seen in four hours. Maybe that was the case in the past, now it is different.
“The hospital is worse than the disease,” Bruno Q., 58, told a reporter for the daily “La Repubblica”. Admitted Oct. 30, he spent 12 days on a sofa in the hall with more than 100 sick people, 70 of them tested positive for Corona. Some days the food did not arrive because, as the nurses said, the kitchen assistants did not show up for work for fear of contamination. Only after loud shouting and the threat of calling the carabinieri, Bruno Q. said, did the patients in the corridor get something to eat: a can of tuna, lettuce, an apple.
Italy in three colors
This is not just the case in Rome, but in many cities and regions. Italy’s healthcare system is about to collapse. Obviously, it is not up to the height of the new epidemic wave.
27,354 new infections were reported on Sunday and 504 deaths (down from 544 on Saturday). This means that around 1.2 million people have been infected with the coronavirus epidemic and around 45,000 have died. Up to this point.
The Roman government has now reacted, similar to the first wave of spring, with drastic measures. To do this, it has divided the country into three color zones according to the regional threat of Covid:
yellow it applies to five regions, from Sardinia to Veneto, which are not subject to major restrictions;
orange nine regions are colored, especially in the south, but also Umbria, Emilia Romagna, Marche and Friuli. There, residents are largely allowed to move freely in their communities, but are prohibited from driving to other places or regions. Exceptions apply to the way of working, urgent visits to the doctor and the like.
It gets really hard on the blush Area that includes Piedmont, Lombardy, Calabria, the Aosta Valley, the autonomous province of Bolzano and, from Sunday, Campania and Tuscany. Here life is severely restricted: citizens can only move within their municipality and only for one valid reason: to work, al – necessary! – Shopping and to the doctor. Bars and restaurants are closed and can only sell “away from home”. Most other stores that do not sell food, medicine or cigarettes will be forcibly closed, as will the universities. Schools remain open for lower grades, seniors must study at home via the Internet.
In the red zone, where almost half of Italians live, friends or family cannot visit each other, play sports or go for a walk. Many find this scandalous, especially Tuscany regional president Eugenio Giani: the number of infections in his Tuscany dropped, the R factor is 1.2 at the low end. But with the help of old numbers that have been out of date for a long time, Tuscany is marked as a crisis zone. It’s “absurd” – that’s exactly how many red-light residents see it.
Died at work: 189 doctors, 46 nurses and orderlies
“I know that we are demanding more victims, but there is no other way if we want to reduce the death toll, stop infections and avoid unbearable pressure on our health system,” said Health Minister Roberto Speranza, explaining the restrictive measures of the government.
You are probably right. Now. Just maybe we could have taken precautions in time and expanded and strengthened the medical sector after the disastrous experiences of spring, when images of army trucks laden with coffins in northern Italy shocked the entire world. After all, almost every expert had predicted a second wave of epidemics for early fall. It has been known for a long time that not only intensive care beds, but also doctors and nurses are missing everywhere.
Milan: a makeshift hospital for the treatment of Covid19 patients has been installed in the exhibition halls of the Fiera Milano. (Source: Claudio Furlan / LaPresse via ZUMA Press / dpa)
It is certainly not up to them if the system faces disaster again. Many work 12 hours or more a day. 189 doctors have lost their lives since the epidemic began. Of the sisters and caregivers, 46 died and 25,000 were infected, according to their professional association “Fnopi.”
Italy’s healthcare system: scandalous for a long time
It depends on the superstructure of the health system, politics and bureaucracy. Large numbers of those responsible there have long been deemed incapable or unwilling. In Lombardy, for example, the health department recently ordered 400,000 units of a flu vaccine. Too bad it doesn’t have the approval of the Italian authorities. The same quantity had to be quickly purchased in the US at an even higher price.
In Campania, inspectors in Rome came across eleven cars in a hospital parking lot, in which patients were receiving oxygen from a bottle. What the examiners were actually looking for, but found neither there nor in three other hospitals, was a concept for the imminent return of the epidemic.
Even the simplest processes do not work reliably: for example, a young Roman woman turned to a newspaper because she had to quarantine herself in her small apartment for 25 days, despite having had a negative test result for 20 days. The health department simply did not respond to his emails and calls. And he was not allowed to leave the apartment without his written permission. Certainly, it is said in the health industry, this is not an isolated case, health authorities are known for their professional disinterest.
Bad conditions in the country
Hospital scandals have been the order of the day in Italy for years. Eight heart patients die in the new intensive care unit in Apulia because they were ventilated with nitrogen instead of oxygen. Three times in Florence, three people received the liver and kidneys of a patient who died of HIV. Now, a video circulating on the network is shocking: it shows not only emergency beds with patients in the corridor of a Neapolitan hospital, but also a man lying dead in the bathroom of a hospital in Naples. Details are not yet clear.
Varese: Hospital staff bring a corona patient to the intensive care unit at Circolo Hospital. (Source: Luca Bruno / AP / dpa)
But they show, as Chancellor Luigi Di Maio wrote on Facebook Wednesday night, that the situation in hospitals is “out of control in Naples and in many parts of Campania.”
Preventing the collapse of the miserable health care system through sweeping cuts in both the private and corporate spheres, as the government says, has of course its price.
The middle class begs in Caritas
Especially in the red areas, thousands of small businesses are about to fail: restaurants, small textile shops in deserted streets and alleys where tourists used to crowd, bars that are allowed to sell an espresso “to go” in The best case. The government promises generous aid to all (a new financial program is said to contain € 38 billion and will add a lot to Italy’s debt by the way), but by the time aid funds reach beneficiaries in need, many of them they could be bankrupt a long time ago. And quite a few are already financially at the end or will never benefit from that state money anyway.
Some of them are now meeting the actors of the Catholic aid organization Caritas. The demand for care packages has increased by 500 percent, says Don Enzo Capitani, director of Caritas in the Tuscan provincial capital, Grosseto, in an interview with a newspaper.
And not only did many more people come, but completely different people as well: showmen, for example, who got stranded here with their fairground tents, black workers who worked in the fields, in the houses, or in restaurant kitchens and who don’t have right to unemployment benefits or similar. , seasonal workers in the tourism industry and also some who were previously part of the upper middle class: artisans and entrepreneurs who suddenly cannot even pay their electricity or gas bills.
