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CHIARI, Italy (AP) – The 160-bed hospital in the town of Chiari, in the Po Valley, runs out of room for patients with the highly contagious variant of COVID-19 first identified in Great Britain, which has put hospitals in the province of Brescia, in northern Italy, on high alert.
This story repeating itself a year after Lombardy became the epicenter of the Italian pandemic was a sickening realization for Dr Gabriele Zanolini, who heads the COVID-19 department at M. Mellini Hospital in the once walled city. which maintains its medieval circular street. model.
“You know there are patients in the emergency room, and you don’t know where to put them,” Zanolini told The Associated Press.
“For me, it’s anguish, not being able to respond to people who need to be treated. The hardest part is finding yourself in a state of emergency after so long.
The outbreak of the British variant filled 90% of hospital beds in the province of Brescia, on the border of the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna regions, as Italy crossed the grim threshold of 100,000 on Monday dead in a pandemic and marks the first anniversary on Wednesday of Italy’s draconian lockdown, the first in the West.
While Zanolini was able to offer a safety valve in Bergamo, which was hit hard in last spring’s deadly push, and in Milan and Varese in the fall, he now has to ask hospitals elsewhere in the region to take action. patients infected with the virus that he himself cannot admit.
New measures are again being considered in Rome to reduce the increase in new cases attributed to variants of the virus, including also those identified in South Africa and Brazil. With the British variant prevalent in Italy and ranging from school-aged children and adolescents to families, Lombardy has again put all schools to distance education, as have several areas in the south where the health care system is weak. more fragile.
In this wave, patients in the COVID-19 ward of Chiari hospital are increasingly family members – husbands and wives, fathers and sons – Zanolini said. And unlike previous peaks, the average age has fallen, with many patients infected with the virus needing respiratory assistance between the ages of 45 and 55. “We have seen, however, that they respond well to treatment,” Zanolini said of younger patients, noting that mortality remains high among the elderly.
Despite months of renewed restrictions from October, the death toll in Italy remains stubbornly high – several hundred a day. It topped 100,000 this week, the second highest in Europe after Britain.
Italy’s new Prime Minister Mario Draghi is focusing on vaccines to help the country emerge from the pandemic, committing in a video message this week to dramatically scale up the campaign in the coming weeks.
“Everyone must do their part to contain this spread of this virus,” Draghi said on Tuesday. “But above all, the government owes its side. On the contrary, he must try to do more every day. The pandemic is not yet overcome. “
The vaccine is the only way out, Zanolini admits. He sees all around him that people tire of restrictions and relax – too relaxed – with gatherings, distances and masks.
“We are worried because we don’t see an end. It looks like the tunnel is still very long, ”Zanolini said. “We find ourselves hit by another wave and we are very tired.”
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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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