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The world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak is ravaging Italian doctors, and the death toll is now 14.
Italian doctors have been dying at a rate of more than one per day since the death of the first doctor on March 11, according to the Federation of Medical Guilds of Italy, which added five names to its list of “fallen doctors” on Thursday. Among those affected were two doctors from the northern city of Como, pneumologist Giuseppe Lanati, 73, and general practitioner Luigi Frusciante, 71, who had left retirement to help respond to the epidemic, to succumb to the virus.
Italian fitness staff account for more than 8% of the country’s 41,000 COVID-19 instances. Doctors and fitness experts have sounded the alarm about a flagrant lack of protective equipment for doctors; the first “fallen doctor,” Roberto Stella, 67, hailed as a hero by his colleagues for proceeding to treat patients even after the inventory of masks in his unit ran out.
Another victim, 57-year-old doctor Marcello Natali, had spoken publicly about the factor before he died on Wednesday. Natali, from Codogno, a city in Lombardy, told Euronews that fitness was facing a desperate shortage of supplies and revealed that he had had to treat patients with coronavirus without gloves.
“We weren’t prepared for coronavirus: as doctors in the post-antibiotic era, we grew up thinking that a tablet was opposed enough,” he said.
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Natali died Wednesday at the Hospital in Milan after suffering double pneumonia, according to the Italian Federation of General Physicians. The group’s regional secretary, Paola Pedrini, told Euronews that the stage was “a war,” with 110 doctors out of six hundred inflamed in the province of Bergamo alone.
“The stage has not progressed since [late] February. We won masks, glove kits, that’s all,” he said. “A mask that lasts part of a day, here lasts a week.”
At least 2,629 Italian fitness staff have become inflamed with COVID-19 since the outbreak began in February, according to a report published Wednesday through the Italian Evidence-Based Medicine Group (GIMBE). This represents 8.3% of the total number of infections in Italy, more than double the rate in China, according to figures published on an online medical page of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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“There’s no want to talk: adequately protect those who will have to protect us,” GIMBE director Nino Cartabellotta told reporters. He said the actual infection rate among Italian fitness staff was probably even higher, as they occasionally worked with an underprotected device and were not tested.
Experts warn that doctors are the least lost race by Italy in the fight against the world’s deadliest coronavirus epidemic, having overtaken China as a country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths on Thursday. In addition to the readmission of retired doctors, Italy has accepted the help of Chinese medical teams. More assistance will arrive on Saturday in the form of a team of 65 doctors and nurses from Cuba, who have reveled in treating Ebola patients.
“Without an influx of mandatory emergency protective equipment, more physical care personnel will become ill, reducing the availability of care for patients, generating new groups of instances, and dangerously weakening the fight against the disease,” said Dr Claudia Lodesani, who heads COVID. -19 reaction in Italy for Doctors Without Borders.
The problems faced by fitness personnel in Italy are also being reported in other European countries, amid the growing demand for protective and testing equipment. In the UK, doctors have been asking the government to prioritize COVID-19 screening for fitness staff, after doctors suspected they had the virus were told they would be tested.
READ: British doctors beg government for coronavirus
Scarcity has also been a challenge in Spain and France, where the death toll is highest in Europe outside Italy. Coral Merino, a nurse in the emergency room of a hospital in Alcalá de Henares, northeast of Madrid, told Business Insider that his paintings became more complicated by the normal shortage of private protective equipment. “There is enough mask to replace them every time we go to see a remote patient. There are no proper dresses,” he says.
Coverage: Medical staff in pictures in the intensive care unit of the Hospital of Brescia, Italy, Thursday 19 March 2020. Italy has the country with the highest coronavirus deaths, beating China with 3,405 deaths. (Claudio Furlan / LaPresse via AP)