A coronavirus cautionary tale from Italy: Don't do what we did

[steve2470]

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/13/opinion/coronavirus-cautionary-tale-italy-dont-do-what-we-did/



A patient in a biocontainment unit is carried on a stretcher from an ambulance arrived at the Columbus Covid 2 Hospital in Rome on Tuesday.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press

Many of us were too selfish to follow suggestions to change our behavior. Now we’re in lockdown and people are needlessly dying.

ROME – “As in any war, we have to choose who to treat and who not.”

That was a headline on March 9 in Il Corriere della Sera, a leading newspaper in Italy, that informed us that hospitals in Italy’s north, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in our country, were being stretched thin and the health care system was on the brink of collapse.

An anesthesiologist at a hospital in Bergamo, one of the cities with the most cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, told the paper that the intensive care unit was already at capacity, and doctors were being forced to start making difficult triage decisions, admitting people who desperately need mechanical ventilation based on age, life expectancy, and other factors. Just like in wartime. The article was inexplicably placed on page 15, while the main headline on the newspaper’s front page relayed the political quarrels over the measures to curb the contagion.