© Reuters / Flavio Lo Scalzo
Italian medical workers wearing protective masks wait by a medical checkpoint at the entrance to a hospital.
If the number of the infected keeps rising, patients with better chances of survival will have to be prioritized, an ER doctor at the epicenter of the Italian outbreak told RT's Ruptly video agency.
In the city of Piacenza, in the heart of northern Italy's coronavirus outbreak, overworked medical personnel are reaching their breaking point - and there seems to be no sign that the epidemic is letting up. With a population of just over 100,000, the city was placed on lockdown on Sunday, after suffering 50 deaths and more than 630 coronavirus diagnoses.
Visibly tired and with bags under his eyes, Davide Bastoni, who works in the emergency room of the Gugliermo Da Saliceto Hospital in Piacenza,
told Ruptly that the battle against Covid-19 has been unceasing - and humbling.
"The night was very exhausting... This epidemic permits us to understand the fact that at the end of the day, we are all human beings, we are all the same, when facing these outbreaks or these viruses," said Bastoni.
Dressed in a white smock and a hair net, the doctor confessed that protecting against the highly-contagious has separated patients from their caregivers.
"They are all patients who need human contact, who need some words of comfort, which is difficult to give them because we have the masks and all the protective devices," the medical professional noted. He said that trying to make treatment more "humane" has forced clinicians to "reinvent" how they communicate with their patients.
Comment: Italy is
shutting down Rome's Ciampino airport, and the main terminal at the central airport. One slightly humorous symptom of the public panic: Italians are buying out the pasta sections of local stores, but are still
avoiding smooth pasta.
More telling: worldwide consumption of Chinese and Italian food has dropped 37% and 24% respectively in the last weeks.
China's health
authorities say China has passed the peak of the outbreak there:
As of Wednesday night, the NHC recorded 15 new cases in mainland China, down from Tuesday's 31 and Monday's 36.
Meanwhile, Zhong Nanshan, Chinese coronavirus adviser and the epidemiologist who discovered the SARS coronavirus in 2003, said he believes the global Covid-19 epidemic will be over by June. There are some promising signs, like the lower re-infection rate among recovered patients, he said, although many cases imported into China show no overt symptoms of the virus.
Zhong says he predicts a fading by June, but
on the condition that countries take "urgent action":
Some countries still don't take the situation very seriously and fail to aggressively contain the Covid-19, Zhong said. In this case, the epidemic might be prolonged even despite the summer heat that makes viral stains relatively inactive, the doctor warned.
Airline stocks
nosedived after Trump's announcement of the US-Europe travel ban. Russian scientists have
developed a test for the virus that gives results within 15 minutes, but it won't be available until this fall. Russia and Europe
delayed their joint Mars mission until 2022 over the panic. Like the CFR cancelling their coronavirus conference over coronavirus, a Russian religious procession on the theme has also been
cancelled, over coronavirus. Russia has
sent 500 diagnostic systems to Iran, capable of handling 50,000 tests. Iran is seeking an IMF
loan for $5 billion to deal with their own crisis. Another 75 people died there yesterday, and confirmed cases passed 10,000. (The U.S. military thinks the virus has
affected Iran's leadership decision-making, for the worse, of course.)
A Brazilian
official who met with Trump on March 7 has tested positive (Bolsonaro is being tested). Trump isn't concerned. Canadian PM Trudeau is
self-quarantining after his wife displayed flu-like symptoms. #MeToo? Beijing had harsh words in response to the U.S. saying they
bungled the first two months of the spread in China (technically, they did - but as noted yesterday and above, they seem to have gotten things under control since then). And finally for this update:
He's probably right, about the official figures being low. But that has a bright side: it means that more cases than previously acknowledged are actually mild or asymptomatic (meaning the mortality rate will be much lower than currently thought).
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