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The second wave of Covid has also arrived for doctors and nurses. With multiplier effect. If the white coats in the hospital become infected, colleagues who remain on duty are forced to take longer shifts. With organics without protection, fatigue prevails and you risk having more contact with a positive patient. Epilogue: other doctors and nurses can get infected.
Rome, hospital emergencies: non-covid departments close. The nurses warn: “Positive and negative patients together, risk of contagion”
Again: with the virus circulating devastatingly in almost all Italian regions, the number of white coats forced to stay home in quarantine for having had contact with a positive family member is also increasing. This snowball effect threatens to weaken hospitals (but also doctors’ offices) at this time when all available forces are needed. Let’s see what the numbers say. Let’s take as a point of reference the newsletter of the Higher Institute of Health of August 25, the last part of the summer, when we saw the infections grow, due to the excesses of the holidays, but we never expected a hurricane like the one in October. At that time, in total, the positive cases among health workers, since the beginning of the pandemic were 30,513, among them 94 deaths had already been registered.
HURRICANE
Two months pass and the second wave arrives in Italy, terrible. For doctors and nurses, compared to February and March, when they were all caught off guard, the impact is not comparable to the first. Despite this, in the last bulletin, the infected white coats amounted to 35,545. In two months, 5,032 doctors and nurses tested positive. Simplifying, we can say that every day 80 health workers are infected throughout the country. Unfortunately there were also victims: the latest available data speak of 110 deaths, which means another 16 in two months.
Here we have to make a clarification: doctors and nurses are citizens who also have a private life, obviously, so for some of them the transmission of the virus could have even occurred outside the wards or medical offices. Carlo Palermo, secretary of Anaao Assomed, association of executive doctors: «Our category runs twice the risk of contagion: in private life and at work. If we add to the positives those who are forced to quarantine, because they are close contacts perhaps of an infected person, we understand why departments run the risk of being understaffed. We also add that, with this emergency situation, those who may have the possibility of retiring thanks to an altitude of 100, tired and stressed after the first wave, take advantage of it.
Fnomceo is another acronym, it is the national federation of the orders of surgeons and dentists. Since the beginning of the pandemic, on an Internet page, it lists the names of the doctors who died from Covid. The list has already reached 183 and sadly it has also been expanded in October. The surname is that of a GP from Torre del Greco, in the province of Naples, Mirko Ragazzon who died at the age of sixty in Covid last Saturday. Giovanni Briglia, 50, an otolaryngologist at the San Camillo hospital in Rome died on October 14, who had not been infected in the ward, but probably by his parents’ caregiver.
In Campania, on October 18, a family doctor from Secondigliano died of Covid, infected, while removing the stitches from a patient who later tested positive. The president of the Milan Physicians Order, Roberto Carlo Rossi, yesterday challenged the agreement with the government on tampons: “I think that the agreement that provides for the possibility of family doctors making swabs quickly in their studies is crazy. It is risky for health. A doctor can also make himself available, but another problem arises, namely that the white coats that do this must be fully protected with all necessary devices.
Last update: 00:48
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