How the second Corona wave is sweeping Italy

How the second Corona wave is sweeping Italy

Italy has already been hit hard by the Coronavirus, now the second wave is raging. The government wants to tackle this problem with drastic measures.

Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, Rome / t-online

San Camillo-Forlanini is a large and venerable hospital with modern facilities in the center of Rome. Those who are hospitalized there need not fear long waiting times, the clinic guarantees on its chic website. Urgent cases are treated in the ER within 15 minutes, even patients without any urgency would be examined within four hours. Maybe it really was like that in the past, now it’s different.

“The hospital is worse than the disease,” Bruno Q., 58, told a journalist for the newspaper “La Repubblica”. Admitted on October 30, he spent 12 days on a sofa in the hallway with over 100 other patients, 70 of whom tested positive for Corona. On some days the food did not arrive because – as the nurses said – the kitchen assistants did not show up for work for fear of contagion. Only after loud screams and the threat to call the police, said Bruno Q., did the patients in the corridor get something to eat: a box of tuna, lettuce, an apple.

Italy in three colors

This is not only the case in Rome, but in many cities and regions. The Italian health system is about to collapse. It is clearly unable to cope with the new epidemic wave. 27,354 new infections were reported on Sunday and 504 deaths (after 544 on Saturday). This means that a total of around 1.2 million have been infected and around 45,000 people have died as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Till now.

The Roman government has now reacted, like the first spring wave, with drastic measures. To do this, he divided the country into three color zones based on the regional Covid threat:

Yellow applies to five regions, from Sardinia to Veneto, which are not subject to significant restrictions;

Nine regions are colored orange, especially in the south, but also Umbria, Emilia Romagna, Marche and Friuli are among them. There the residents are largely allowed to move freely in their communities, but they are forbidden to drive to other places or regions. The exceptions apply to the way of work, urgent visits to the doctor and the like.

It gets really tough in the red zone, which includes Piedmont, Lombardy, Calabria, Valle d’Aosta, the autonomous province of Bolzano and, from Sunday, Campania and Tuscany. Here, life is severely reduced: citizens can only move within their municipality and only for a valid reason: to work, when necessary! – Shopping and to the doctor. Bars and restaurants are closed and can only be sold “away from home”. Most other shops that do not sell food, medicine or cigarettes will be forcibly closed, as will universities. Schools remain open for lower grades, older ones have to study at home via the Internet.

In the red zone, where almost half of the Italians live, friends or relatives cannot therefore visit each other, play sports or walk together. Many find it scandalous, especially the president of the Tuscany Region Eugenio Giani: the number of infections in his Tuscany has decreased, the R factor is 1.2 at the lower end. But with the help of old numbers that are no longer updated, Tuscany is marked as a crisis zone. It is “absurd”, so many residents of the red zones see it.

Deaths at work: 189 doctors, 46 nurses

“I know we are asking for more victims, but there is no other way if we want to lower the death toll, curb infections and prevent unbearable pressures on our health system,” Health Minister Roberto Speranza said, explaining the government’s restrictive measures. .

He is probably right. Now. Only maybe we could have taken precautions in good time and expanded and strengthened the medical sector, after the disastrous experiences of spring when images of army trucks loaded with coffins in northern Italy shocked the whole world. After all, most experts had predicted a second wave of epidemics soon for the fall. It has long been known that not only intensive care beds, but also doctors and nurses are missing everywhere.

It is certainly not up to them if the system faces disaster again. Many work 12 hours or more a day. 189 doctors have lost their lives since the beginning of the epidemic. 46 of the nurses died and 25,000 were infected, according to their professional association “Fnopi”.

Italian health system: scandalous for some time

It depends on the superstructure of the health system, politics and bureaucracy. A large number of perpetrators have long been regarded as either incapable or reluctant. In Lombardy, for example, the health department recently ordered 400,000 units of the flu vaccine. Too bad it does not have the approval of the Italian authorities. The same quantity had to be bought quickly in the United States at an even higher price.

In Campania, Rome inspectors found eleven cars in a hospital parking lot where patients were receiving oxygen from a bottle. What the examiners were actually looking for, but found neither there nor in three other hospitals, was a concept for the long-looming return of the epidemic.

Even the simplest processes don’t work reliably: For example, a young Roman woman turned to a newspaper because she had to quarantine alone in her small apartment for 25 days, even though she had a negative test result for 20 days. The health department simply did not respond to their emails and calls. And she wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment without her written permission. Certainly, it is said in the health sector, this is not an isolated case: health authorities are famous for their professional indifference.

Bad conditions in the country

Hospital scandals have been on the agenda in Italy for years. Eight heart patients die in the new intensive care unit in Puglia because they are ventilated with nitrogen instead of oxygen. Three times in Florence, three people received the liver and kidneys of a patient who died of HIV. Now a video circulating on the internet is shocking: it not only shows emergency beds with patients in the corridor of a Neapolitan hospital, but also a man lying dead in the bathroom of a Naples hospital. The details are not yet clear.

But they show, as Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio wrote on Facebook Wednesday evening, that the situation in hospitals “in Naples and in many parts of Campania is out of control”. Avoiding the collapse of the miserable health system by making radical cuts to the private and commercial sphere, as the government says, obviously has its price.

The middle class asks for alms from Caritas

Thousands of small businesses are at risk of bankruptcy, especially in the red areas: restaurants, small textile shops in the deserted streets and alleys where tourists once thronged, bars that are only allowed to sell a “take away” espresso. The government promises generous aid for all – a new financial program is said to contain 38 billion euros and, en passant, will greatly increase Italy’s debt – but when the aid funds reach the beneficiaries in need, many of them could be failed for a long time. And many are already financially at the end or will never benefit from such state money.

Some of them are now getting to know the actors of the Catholic humanitarian organization Caritas. The request for assistance packages has increased by 500 percent, says Fr Enzo Capitani, director of Caritas in the Tuscan capital Grosseto, in an interview with a newspaper.

And not only many more people came, but completely different people too: showmen, for example, who got stuck here with their trade fair businesses, black workers who worked in the fields, in families or in restaurant kitchens and who they are not entitled to unemployment benefits or similar. , seasonal tourism workers and even some who were formerly part of the high-income middle class: artisans and entrepreneurs who suddenly can’t even pay their electricity or gas bills.