No gloves, no masks, Italy medical facilities crumble

Milan, March 23: At Italy’s Oglio Po hospital, 25 out of 90 doctors are infected with the coronavirus, compounding the strain faced by a health system overwhelmed by the world’s second biggest outbreak.

Adding in nurses, technicians and other employees, a fifth of the hospital’s personnel has tested positive, hospital director Daniela Ferrari said.

They and healthcare workers like them almost certainly unwittingly spread the virus before needing treatment or quarantine themselves, researchers and unions say.

The picture is the same at other hospitals, among family doctors and in nursing homes — exacerbated, unions, sector leaders and medics say, by them not having enough masks and gloves when the outbreak was detected a month ago. “We are at the end of our strength,” said Doctor Romano Paolucci, who came out of retirement to help the Oglio Po hospital near Cremona, one of the worst hit towns in the Lombardy region.

“We do not have sufficient resources and especially staff because apart from everything else, now the staff are beginning to get sick.”

In Lombardy, the Italian region with the highest number of cases and deaths, at least two hospitals became vehicles of contamination, with patients infecting medical staff who then spread the disease as they travelled around their communities before a stringent lockdown was imposed.

That is one factor that has helped the virus spread so quickly, said Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research.

“Patients infected other patients and doctors who then went out and contaminated others,” Remuzzi said.