(yes, another one. i thought this different enough to start a new Cv thread)
excepts - By Guglielmo Gianott, executive director of surgery at the Cremona hospital

I'm a doctor at Italy's hardest-hit hospital. I had to decide who got a ventilator and who didn't.

The infectious diseases doctors, respiratory experts and general physicians had all been removed from the hospital.
They were all infected. The only ones left to care for these people were us.
(this doctor himself was eventually infected)

My specialty is in emergency surgery. I have always been taught that in times of war, we must decide which patients will live and which are probably going to die.
That's the situation we're currently living through in Italy.

Like every hospital in the region of Lombardy, we are working at the extreme limit of our capabilities.
All the beds in the hospital have been taken up by patients with COVID, so there isn't much scope for activity beyond this disease.
It's a very, very bad situation

The situation at my hospital is quite chaotic, it's changing from hour to hour. It was like that even when I was there, and it has been like that since then.
In the hospital, the day passes swiftly, especially given the mental torment of decision making.
When it comes to who gets the ventilator, it's a choice. There aren't any specific protocols.

The only other drugs we were using in the ward were anti-malaria treatments together with HIV drugs, but there weren't any indications that they were working.
On the contrary, patients adopting those treatments were seeing significant side effects. We worried they were doing more harm than good.

Perhaps worst of all, we're not able to care for other patients who aren't COVID-infected. Many cancer patients won't make it through

But don't get me wrong. The young are infected at just the same rate as old people, and we're seeing many young people end up in intensive care.
They might be more likely to recover but the chances of your condition deteriorating after infection are just as likely if you're young. We're seeing evidence of that every day.

The fact that you are caring for COVID patients means you can't ever let your guard down because you could become infected at any moment.
Stress and fatigue become big issues.

I hope the Italian experience will serve to help other countries understand this is not a joke. You can't take it too seriously.
Because when the virus arrives you will no longer have the ability to do anything else.
Everything will be paralysed.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-03- ... s/12090912