Italy struggles with rising death toll from virus
Italy’s tally of coronavirus cases and deaths continued to soar on Saturday, as officials announced 793 more deaths and 6,557 new cases.
The surging case numbers have frustrated Italian health officials. Statements by authorities earlier on in the outbreak had raised hopes that new infections might soon start dropping off. But on Friday, officials reported record increases. Saturday’s numbers hit another record. Italy, at the heart of western Europe’s rampaging outbreak, now counts 53,578 known cases and a death toll of nearly 5,000.
At one funeral in Bergamo, a priest gave a final benediction. There were no flowers, no embraces. Francesca Steffanoni and her mother hurried away from Bergamo’s main cemetery, their furtive farewell lasting no more than five minutes.
Bergamo is the epicenter of the hardest-hit province of Italy’s hardest-hit region, Lombardy, the site of hundreds of coronavirus deaths. Families here are deprived of a bedside farewell with virus-stricken loved ones, or even a traditional funeral, and the cemetery is so overwhelmed by the number of dead that military trucks transported 65 bodies to a neighboring region for cremation this week.
Steffanoni had taken her mother to watch as the coffin containing an 82year-old relative — a widower with a heart condition, struck down with the virus — was driven inside the imposing gates. They wore masks and gloves; they kept their distance.
“In theory, we should not have gone. But it was one of her last relatives who remains,” Steffanoni said.
More than 60 percent of the latest deaths in Italy occurred in the northern region of Lombardy, whose hospitals have been reeling under a staggering case load that has left intensive-care beds hard to find and respirators in short supply.
Italian health officials realize they need to shorten the time between emergence of symptoms and diagnosis, said Silvio Brusaferro, the head of the national Superior Health Institute. Currently that lag is about five days, he said.
Almost 287,000 cases have been confirmed globally, including more than 11,900 deaths, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University. Nearly 89,000 people have recovered.
In Spain, almost a week into tight restrictions on free movement and the closure of most shops, police intensified their efforts to enforce confinement rules with fines and extra patrols to stop city-dwellers with second homes in the country from leaving town for the weekend.
Spain now has the thirdhighest number of infections worldwide. On Saturday it reported almost 5,000 new cases in the past day, bringing the total to nearly 25,000. The death toll rose to 1,326, up from 1,002 Friday.
Dr. Olga Meridiano, who treated victims of a 2004 jihadist bomb attack in Madrid that killed nearly 200 people and wounded many times more, said nothing prepared her for the national health tragedy that Spain is now enduring.
“I have been through many situations,” she said. “But nothing is like this.”