New year barely a blip for hospitals

Treating COVID’s sick kept them busy as ever

ROME — While the world said goodbye — or good riddance — to 2020, a year in which the pandemic brought hardship and pain to billions, some of those who have been fighting the virus on the front lines soldiered on even as the clock passed midnight.

At the Casalpalocco Covid 3 Hospital on the outskirts of Rome, doctors and nurses barely seemed to register the new year as they tended to 100 patients struggling with serious to critical illness as a result of coronavirus infections.

In one intensive care ward, all but one of a dozen beds were occupied. Medical staffers calmly tended to patients lying in dimly lit rooms, dispensed medication, checked respiratory machines and filled in medical records.

“This particular (New Year’s Eve) is a surreal night, as was Christmas, as will be the Epiphany, as was the past Easter and all the other holidays,” said Dr. Paolo Petrassi, the night shift coordinator. “They are, let’s say, holidays detached from what was the real world once, as we have known it forever.”

The 53-year-old recounted the experience now familiar to so many in the medical profession worldwide who have had to treat COVID-19 patients: having to constantly monitor patients and

manage their condition, with each having their own set of complicated problems.

Italy was the early epicenter of the pandemic in Europe in the spring. Images of Italian nurses and doctors, exhausted as they briefly removed their protective gear, became a grim portent of what would happen to their colleagues in Spain, France, the United States and elsewhere months later.

Last month, after a summer in which Italy seemed to have beaten back the scourge, it again became the country with the highest death toll in Europe. And once more, the grim reality was reflected in the eyes of Italy’s medical workers.

European regulators approved the first vaccine shortly before Christmas. Countries across the European Union began administering the shots on Dec. 27, but it will be a long time before a sizeable number of the bloc’s 450 million inhabitants are immunized.

“We are investing all this so that all these efforts will not be in vain,” Petrassi said.

Andrea Rosa The Associated Press Medical personnel tend to patients Friday at Casalpalocco Covid 3 hospital on the outskirts of Rome. Hospital doctors and nurses hardly seemed to register the new year as they treated 100 patients with coronavirus infections.