Julio Algañaraz
10/17/2020 12:55 PM
Clarín.com
World
Updated 10/17/2020 12:55 PM
The epidemic decidedly entered a new acute phase in Italy.
This Saturday, 10,925 were infected with coronavirus throughout Italy and 47 patients who died.
It took two weeks in October to
go from less than a thousand infected every 24 hours to more than ten thousand
, with the prospect of reaching 15 thousand infected daily in a few days, as announced by the most listened to scientist, the virologist from the University of Padua Andrea Crisanti.
The second wave is until now much less deadly than the first, which in just over two months caused more than 30 thousand deaths (currently reaching 36,447), due to the rapid spread of Covid-19.
The plague coming from China has increased its contagion capacity at a speed that took the defense mechanisms of the health system and the national government by surprise.
The hopes of having won the battle against the coronavirus collapsed
after Professor Crisanti himself, who was the one who succeeded in disseminating the methods of controls with molecular swabs that allow tracing the traces of infections in his Veneto region, said that “ has collapsed ”with the momentum of the exponential growth of the pandemic, the national system of controls.
Chinstraps and few people in the center of Milan, this Saturday.
The coronavirus spreads across Italy.
Photo: AP
In Italy,
more than five thousand outbreaks are active throughout the peninsula
.
While in the first wave, which began at the end of February and almost died out in June, the relentless punishment of the coronavirus took its toll on the rich northern regions, especially Lombardy, the second wave has rapidly spread to the 21 autonomous regions and provinces contagions.
Worry in the south, less prepared
In the southern regions of Italy the regional public health systems are much more fragile than in the center-north.
Although Lombardy continues to exhibit the worst statistics of the epidemic, the situation in Campania is very worrying, whose capital is Naples with its large urban area, which is second in absolute numbers and which on Friday registered 1,127 infected.
Its president, Vincenzo de Luca, opened the fire of controversies by ordering the
closure of schools until the end of the month
to take the momentum from Covid-19.
De Luca also ordered the nightly curfew of bars and restaurants.
On the government side, the measure to close the schools, reopened nationwide on September 14, was described as a "very serious and counterproductive measure."
The national government, which this weekend will decide on
new restrictions throughout the
Italian
territory
, assured that it is not in its plans to close the schools.
As the number of patients admitted to hospitals grows, especially in intensive care, Campania is at the center of concerns because of
fears the saturation of beds in hospitals
.
In Naples and the Campania provinces there is an additional very dangerous problem: the growing shortage of doctors, nurses and paramedical personnel, which weakens care in intensive care units, where the most seriously ill end up who need to be cared for by teams led by resuscitation specialists .
Italian police officers patrol the entrance to the town of Sambuca di Sicilia, due to restrictions due to the pandemic.
Photo: EFE
The regions ask for help, but the government responded in a seven-hour meeting with critical claims.
The commissioner for the pandemic of the Ministry of Health, Domenico Arcuri, and the minister of Regional Affairs, Francisco Bocha, asked for explanations.
"We want to know where the 1600 respirators that we assigned to them have gone, which allow transforming sub-intensive posts into intensive care," said Arcuri.
"We have another 1,500 respirators, but we won't ship them until we know it was from the other 1,600."
Arcuri pointed to the case of Campania, which received 231 of these therapy devices and 167 sub-intensive.
“Now there should be a total of 566, but it's only 433. Why?” He asked.
They fear another collapse in hospitals
Suspicions and controversies are also the order of the day.
The government of Rome maintains that 14,000 million euros were sent to inflate resources to the regions.
The most delicate area is that of intensive therapies.
In the first wave of the epidemic, it was here that the most dramatic moments were experienced because the special beds where patients were intubated were not enough to face the devastating double pneumonia caused by the coronavirus.
Passengers at Fiumicino airport in Rome wait to get tested for coronavirus.
Photo: EFE
Many times rescuers were presented with the dilemma of two patients to give them oxygen and a single bed to occupy.
There was no choice but to save the one with the best chance.
“There were 5179 intensive care beds at the beginning of the pandemic and we activated up to 9463 positions.
Now they are 6628 in operation ”.
There is still time to receive all the most seriously ill.
At the moment, there are 586 people injected with oxygen. On April 3, a mournful day, there were 4,068 people hospitalized in intensive care.
But
the virus advances very fast and in November the danger of a saturation could appear in the hospitals of Milan
.
The Sacco hospital for infectious diseases and Fatebenefratelli have already announced that they accept only coronavirus patients.
In Lombardia there were 2067 infected on Friday.
There is an urgent reorganization in most of the hospitals.
As happened in the first wave, the sectors that care for patients who do not suffer from the virus have begun to cannibalize.
Beds and doctors, like nurses, move urgently to the area of the epidemic.
“
Almost two hundred doctors died in Italy during the first phase of the epidemic
.
The others, along with the nurses and the rest of the staff, have continued to face a critical and very exhausting situation from a physical and psychological point of view.
Now the second wave comes to us.
It becomes difficult ”, explains Dr. Angelo Pan, head of infectious diseases at the Cremona hospital.
"The virus has not weakened, on the contrary it is much more contagious than before," he warns.
Dr. Pan assures that "here in Cremona we all have a death in the family or friends who died from the virus."
"We are going to do the right thing."
But there is a disturbing reality: doctors, disheartened, prefer to retire or move to the private sector, taking away essential forces from the fight against Covid-19.
Twenty thousand doctors, nurses and health operators are missing in the hospitals and among the army of family doctors, the basis of the health system.
Just to follow the traces of the infections, it takes 6,000 people who were going to be hired and are still waiting, while hospitals receive more and more pressure from those who need to know, in the first place, if they have been infected.
Professor Andrea Crisanti explained to
Corriere della Sera
that "the system of tracing with swabs and other analyzes has collapsed because it is not possible with 10 thousand cases a day to control all subjects at risk."
Crisanti was the one who raised
the need for a quarantine at Christmas
to allow a "reset" of the system in crisis for at least three weeks.
With the devastations that the second wave has begun to cause, the inevitable time for critical reflections also arrives.
"They said they were ready to face the second wave, but it was expected for later and much less murderous," said a unionist from the specialists in resuscitation.
In the summer months of the truce of the pandemic, regional and national authorities did less than they had to.
The October outbreak has taken the country by surprise.
There is no capillary home care network that should have removed so many patients from hospitals.
The government has the weekend and no later than Monday, as the deadline to announce effective measures to contain the advance of the coronavirus.
It seeks the formula to effectively attack Covid-19
without immobilizing the country with a quarantine that could have disastrous economic consequences
.
Until now, no one in the world discovered the formula.
Italy lost 10% of its national wealth in the March-May quarantine and wants to avoid a dramatic stop that aggravates the economic crisis from which it was recovering well, helped by a European Union plan that granted it 209 billion euros. dollars in grants and loans for very long terms and very low interest.
Rome, correspondent