Cars and ambulance queue for available beds outside the Cotugno Infectious Disease Hospital in Naples
Credit: Salvatore Laporta/IPA/Shutterstock /Shutterstock
The line of ambulances stretched from the doors of the emergency room and wound down the road outside one of the biggest hospitals in Naples.
Inside, overflowing wards made social distancing impossible, while an acute shortage of oxygen left patients gasping for air.
"This place looks like Kabul, or Baghdad. In a Western country, scenes like these are intolerable,” a nurse said. “We don’t know where to put people anymore, this situation has been going on for weeks.”
The scene could have been from March, when Italy’s richer northern regions were taken by surprise and overwhelmed by coronavirus, becoming the epicentre of Europe’s pandemic.
Italy is now at the peak of a cruel second wave, and this time it is the poverty-stricken and underfunded south that is bearing the brunt.
Italy’s tragic first wave is etched on the national psyche. Painful memories are now being jogged.
It has not only been ambulances queuing outside crippled hospitals. Patients began arriving in their cars for oxygen earlier this month, with many wheezing patients given air from the driving seat.
There is not enough of it to go around.
One Neapolitan woman, a lawyer, told an Italian paper she had contacted 102 pharmacies in three days in a desperate attempt to get oxygen for a sick relative.
A family member of a Covid-19 patient carries an oxygen cylinder to them outside the Cotugno Hospital in Naples
Credit: Ivan Romano /Getty Images Europe
The same hospital where ambulance queues formed, Cardarelli, is currently the subject of investigating the bathroom death, and the hospital’s director has ordered an internal probe. An elderly man suspected of having Covid-19 took his last, laboured breaths in a bathroom at the emergency room, his undignified end memorialised on a smartphone by a fellow patient and posted online.
Many in the Naples area resign themselves to what the La Repubblica newspaper denounced as hellish, “Dantesque” waits to receive treatment for COVID-19. Others bundle up their loved ones and head north, where Italian health care enjoys a better reputation — but many hospitals there are also overwhelmed.
Healthcare unions say Campania has lost about 15,000 health care workers in recent years to budget cuts. Italy’s Civil Protection force is currently recruiting 450 doctors to help the region care for COVID-19 patients.
The person behind the video inside Cardarelli Hospital “took advantage of a moment when he saw some wad of gauze of the floor,” a union official said. “The staff is doing super-human work,” he said. The video “doesn’t discredit that.”
As of Friday, the Campania region, of which Naples is the capital, recorded 129,502 confirmed coronavirus cases and 1,217 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Hospitalisations, however, have risen from about 400 at the beginning of October to about 2,500 currently.
According to the latest data published by Italy’s GIMBE Foundation, in Campania 47 per cent of beds in regular wards and 34 per cent in intensive care units are occupied by Covid-19 patients.
Earlier this month, Campania was declared by the Italian government a high-risk “red zone,” along with six other regions, including Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot and one of the country’s poorer regions.
In the so-called red areas, the government has imposed a partial lockdown, with stricter restrictions to people’s movements and wider closures of business activities.
South of Campania, Calabria’s underfunded and heavily indebted hospitals, which have been under government control since 2010, are also struggling to cope with the virus.
Calabria’s state of chaos was further aggravated this week after three health chiefs resigned in just over a week, in what the Italian media described as a "soap opera" and "a grotesque cabaret".
Volunteers conduct coronavirus tests in the church of San Severo Fuori le Mura in Naples
Credit: CIRO FUSCO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock /Shutterstock
The resignations left the southern region in a state of disarray and without an emergency plan, even more exposed to the criminal businesses of the local mafia, ‘Ndrangheta — one of the most powerful crime organizations worldwide.
The latest commissioner to resign, Eugenio Gaudio, claimed he had changed his mind about the job because his wife did not want to move to Calabria.
But there was speculation that his abrupt stepping down was linked to revelations that, as head of a Rome university, he is under investigation for alleged misconduct in hiring staff.
The government is now buying time before naming a new commissioner, to avoid a new misstep.
However, this time it will likely resort to the help of Gino Strada, a well-known surgeon who founded the Emergency NGO and is specialised in helping civilian victims in war zones.
Strada, who has openly offered his cooperation, would work alongside the new health commissioner, organising special “Covid hotels” reserved for coronavirus patients and setting up field hospitals that should ease pressure on the regular ones.
Strada’s name, however, sparked a heated controversy in the region, with some local officials complaining that Calabria “is not a third world country and shouldn’t be treated like a war zone.”
Even Nicola Gratteri, anti-mafia chief prosecutor in the Calabrian city of Catanzaro, expressed skepticism over Strada’s possible role.
“We don’t need field hospitals here as if we were in Afghanistan,” Gratteri said on Friday. “In Calabria we have 18 closed hospitals, it would be sufficient to reopen three or four of them.”
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