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Patients wait in line of cars in front of a hospital in Naples to be tested or treated
Photo: Ciro De Luca / REUTERS
In the spring, pictures from Italy went around the world.
They showed military trucks hauling away corpses and conveyed a clear message: the coronavirus can cause considerable suffering if not controlled.
Now the number of cases in the Mediterranean country is rising sharply again.
On Thursday, authorities reported nearly 38,000 new infections within 24 hours.
The country, with its 60 million inhabitants, had previously passed the one million detected infections mark since the pandemic began.
The video of a man who was found dead in the washroom of an emergency room in a clinic in Naples also caused considerable unrest.
It is unclear whether the man has already been treated there or had been waiting for a test.
The pictures also show a hallway overflowing with hospital beds.
The video had spread quickly on social media.
People treated in parking lots
Those in charge of the affected hospital promised an investigation into the circumstances of death.
The Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio sees the "shocking video" as further evidence of how precarious the situation around the Italian port city has become.
"In Naples and in many parts of Campania the situation is out of control," wrote Luigi Di Maio on Facebook on Wednesday evening.
There are reports of people being treated in the car in parking lots.
Others would have to wait far too long to be transported to the hospital.
Regional Minister Francesco Boccia described the video recordings as shameful for all those responsible.
At the same time, in a TV interview on the La7 broadcaster, he pointed out that too many people with mild corona symptoms come to the hospital instead of recovering at home.
Pictures from Naples show people waiting in long lines of cars in front of a hospital to be tested or treated.
Some sick people were still supplied with oxygen or an infusion in their car, reports the Reuters news agency.
Calabria: 154 intensive care beds for the entire region
While the north of the country was mainly affected in the spring, Italy is seeing a worrying increase in the number of cases in significantly more regions during the current wave.
This also includes poorer areas in the south of the country that have a poorer hospital system.
At the beginning of the year, 146 intensive care beds were available throughout Calabria.
Despite the threat of the coronavirus, their number only rose to 154 by the end of October. In Sicily, the mayor of Palermo warned against the background of rising numbers of infections on Monday of an "inevitable massacre".
Due to the regionally different risk, the Italian government recently divided the country into three risk zones.
More than half of the 20 regions (comparable to our federal states) were designated as red or orange zones.
In the red zones - including Lombardy and Piedmont in the north and Calabria in the south - partial lockdowns with exit restrictions apply.
The city of Naples and the surrounding region of Campania, on the other hand, have so far only been rated by the government as a zone with moderate risk (yellow) based on 21 indicators.
Several politicians had sharply criticized this in the past few days and warned of a collapse of the hospitals.
There were doubts about the credibility of the numbers from the region.
After the shock video from Naples, there were signals from Rome to re-examine the situation.
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irb / dpa / Reuters
