‘Strange monster’ has city in its grip
Tom Kington
The Times
November 15, 2020
(paywalled)
Maurizio Di Mauro took three weeks to win his personal battle with coronavirus. As he returned to work at his hospital in Naples he was facing a war.
The director of Cotugno hospital, perched on a hill overlooking a stricken city, resumed working this week amid headlines about seriously ill victims being fed oxygen by medics in the car park after beds ran out.
“We found people in their cars with pneumonia,” he told The Times. The Red Cross is setting up a tent with oxygen supplies to handle the patients.
Mr Di Mauro admits that he has no idea how or why the virus can strike hard or not at all, nor how he got it. “It’s a strange monster,” he said. “I don’t understand how some need a ventilator in two hours and others don’t suffer. I have always worn a mask and I have no clue how I got it. Maybe I touched something with the virus on it.”
The hospital director is at the centre of Italy’s second wave of the disease, which has put more than 33,000 people in hospital, more than during the dark months of March and April, and is killing about 600 a day.
The relief felt this northern spring as Italy’s tough ten-week lockdown kept the virus away from the underfunded hospitals in the south has turned to horror as Covid storms through Campania, of which Naples is the capital, with more than 2,000 in hospital and daily cases exceeding 4,000.
The city is not coping. Police were called to the crowded Cardarelli hospital this week when a patient posted a video of a suspected virus victim of 84 slumped dead in a lavatory and claimed that he had been abandoned by staff. The government placed the city and its region of Campania under partial lockdown yesterday (Friday), along with Tuscany, joining the other “red zones”, Lombardy, Calabria, Piedmont and Valle D’Aosta and the province of Bolzano.
“The health service has had since March to get ready for this,” Luigi de Magistris, 53, the mayor of Naples, said. “So dead bodies and queues in cars are unacceptable. Regular operations have been put on hold for the past six weeks and people with broken bones are stuck at home.”
Hospitals in the Lazio region, Campania’s neighbour to the north which includes Rome, reported dozens of Covid-19 sufferers arriving in rented ambulances from Campania this week searching for a bed.
“The news coming out of the hospitals is atrocious,” Chiara Landi, 26, said. “I want to know why we haven’t locked down already.” The trainee magistrate was joining the queue in Naples at a station where 1,100 people are tested a day.
“I know two families who are totally infected as well as my boyfriend’s sister and now my mother, who has fever. I am terrified she ends up in hospital.”
Further along the queue, Maria Domenica Falciglia, 61, said that she was testing because her son, a doctor at Monaldi hospital, was positive. “I am scared of being here,” she said, pointing to others in the line huddled together.
Government advisers along with Mr De Magistris and Vincenzo De Luca, the regional governor, have been calling for a lockdown. Many are asking why it was left so late.
“It’s like an Agatha Christie mystery,” Mr De Magistris said. He suspected that government officials deciding the fate of Naples had been fed overestimates of the number of hospital beds. “Where are these beds?” he asked. “The hospitals are full.”
The mayor blamed Mr De Luca, who has responsibility for local healthcare, and suggested that the false count was given to conceal how little preparation was undertaken for a second wave.
Mr De Luca, who has threatened to break up gatherings with a flame-thrower, has denied negligence and threatened to sue his critics.
As politicians pointed fingers at each other, Luca Liuzzi, 30, a male nurse, was working hard to swab those in line at the testing centre. After losing his grandmother, 86, to Covid-19 in April and watching his brother, who worked alongside him at the centre, become infected, Mr Liuzzi said that he risked contagion every shift. “Everyone is scared,” he said. “But my granny’s death motivates me and I am not giving up.”
