At Cremona hospital, south-east of Milan, nobody expected 50 patients with signs of pneumonia to be hospitalized at the end of February in a single weekend. And in the past week, nearly 600 have presented themselves. “The problem is that the patient is fine until the symptoms appear. And there it degrades very quickly and it is necessary to intubate it urgently, " explains Dr. Angelo Pan, head of the infectious diseases department. " We have 148 inpatients with Covid-19, including 11 in intensive care, and 24 in respiratory assistance ," says the director of health services, Professor Rosario Canino. We work 14 hours a day, and we can't take it anymore. We need anesthesiologists, infectious disease specialists, pulmonologists, interventionists, resuscitators ”, he called out for help.
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Because Italy has few hospital beds. In 2017, the latest available figures from the OECD, it had 3.2 beds per 1,000 inhabitants,
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