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MILAN – Italy’s business capital has become the center of a second wave of coronavirus, jeopardizing the country’s economic recovery and rekindling the specter of a health crisis that Italians believed to have overcome this spring.
With an exponential increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths linked to Covid-19, hospitals in Milan are running out of beds even after converting services and suspending elective procedures. Ambulances have been forced to wait hours to drop patients off at hospitals where Covid-19 patients are sometimes kept on carts in crowded hallways.
On Friday, the government cordoned off Milan and the surrounding region of Lombardy, as well as three of Italy’s 20 other regions. In these so-called red areas freedom of movement is severely restricted, most shops are closed, cafes and restaurants can only sell take-out, and children from the second year of college have returned to school. distance learning. The government said it would assess the situation in two weeks.
“I don’t know if the new lockdown will be enough, nobody knows,” said Massimo Galli, head of infectious diseases at Sacco Hospital in Milan, where, in the second half of October, doctors treated as many critically ill patients of Covid-19 as in all of March and April.
Milan has become emblematic of how quickly the pandemic can spiral out of control in a place thought to have conquered the virus. Lombardy, with a population of 10 million, recorded an average of 115 daily deaths from Covid-19 last week, up from just four a day in early October. About half of the region’s deaths and hospitalizations occur in Milan.
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