Europe’s hospitals strain to treat ill
Setting up makeshift ICU wards in libraries and conference centers, embattled European medical workers strained Friday to save thousands of desperately ill coronavirus patients as stocks of medicine, protective equipment and breathing machines grew shorter by the hour.
Europe’s three worsthit countries — Italy, Spain and France — have surpassed 30,000 dead, more than half of the global toll.
One Spanish hospital has turned its library into a makeshift intensive care unit. In France, space was set aside for bodies in a vast food market. The French prime minister said he is “fighting hour by hour” to ward off shortages of essential drugs used to keep COVID19 patients alive.
Philippe Montravers, an anesthesiologist in Paris, said medics are preparing to fall back on older drugs, such as the opiates fentanyl and morphine, that had fallen out of favor, because newer painkillers are in short supply.
“The work is extremely tough and heavy,” he said. “We’ve had doctors, nurses, caregivers who got sick, infected … but who have come back after recovering. It’s a bit like those World War I soldiers who were injured and came back to fight.”
In a vast exhibition center in Madrid that was hastily converted into a 1,300bed field hospital, bed No. 01.30 held patient Esteban Pinaredo, aged 87.
“I’m good, I love you,” Pinaredo told his family via Skype. “I will run away as soon as I can.”
The makeshift facility’s organizer, Antonio Zapatero, said Spain’s nationwide lockdown must be maintained.
“Otherwise, this is what you are facing,” he said, pointing at the rows of beds.