Harrowing video from a hospital at the center of Italy's coronavirus outbreak shows doctors overwhelmed by critical patients
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Stark footage from a hospital in Bergamo - Italy's worst-hit city - shows doctors and nurses desperately fighting to control the coronavirus outbreak.
The video, broadcast Thursday by Sky News from the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital, shows an emergency arrivals ward. It has been transformed into an intensive care unit (ICU) because the regular ICU is already full.Watch the Sky broadcast here:
The footage shows wards with more patients than they can handle, and dozens of suffering patients. The staff are clearly overwhelmed.The hospital's head of emergency care, Dr Roberto Cosentini, told Sky News: "It's a very severe pneumonia, and so it's a massive strain for every health system, because we see every day 50 to 60 patients who come to our emergency department with pneumonia, and most of them are so severe they need very high volumes of oxygen,"
"And so we had to reorganize our emergency room and our hospital [to] three levels of intensive care."Most of the city's public services are in crisis.
On Wednesday night, 15 Italian military trucks were seen ferrying around 60 bodies from morgues across the city to cremation sites in 12 other northern Italian towns, after Bergamo's mayor called for aid.
Several morgues and Bergamo's sole crematorium, which can only cremate 25 people a day, are overwhelmed.Churches are banned from holding services, but have been used to store coffins. The gymnasium at Ponte San Pietro Hospital was turned into a makeshift mortuary.
On Thursday, Stefano Fagiuoli, head of the hospital's department of medicine, turned to Facebook to ask people to donate to help the hospital on GoFundMe.
Amid the bad news, a 22-day-old baby admitted to the hospital who tested positive for the coronavirus has recovered and been allowed to go home, according to Il Messagero.Copyright © 2021. Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.For reprint rights. Times Syndication Service.
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