VIDEO: As northern Italy is overwhelmed caring for patients, there are fears the coronavirus is quietly infecting people elsewhere in the country despite a nationwide shutdown. More at:
FILE - In this March 23, 2020 file photo, coffins are placed on scaffolding in the Crematorium Temple of Piacenza, northern Italy, awaiting cremation due to the coronavirus emergency. Italy is seeing a slight stabilizing in its confirmed coronavirus infections two weeks into the world’s most extreme nationwide shutdown, but the virus is taking its silent spread south after having ravaged the health care system in the north.
’’It is something devastating,” said the Rev. Mario Carminati, who has turned over a church in the tiny Lombard town of Seriate to host coffins before they are taken by military convoy to be cremated. This week, dozens were lined up in two neat rows down the central aisle, and were immediately replaced by new ones when they were taken away.
Some 500 medical personnel at the hospital are infected, and Lorini said he has found himself treating colleagues, friends, children of friends and parents of friends in his overwhelmed 88-bed ICU that serves a city of 120,000. Cateno De Luca, mayor of the Sicilian city of Messina, took the extraordinary step of recording a warning to residents in his nasal, gravelly voice for drones to play as they fly over the seaside city monitoring residents’ movements.Italy’s high death toll and the virus’ aggressive spread in the country has led Italian epidemiologists to estimate that the true number of infected people could be as high as 450,000 and to say that under-testing is putting Italians at risk of infection.
The government on March 10 imposed a nationwide lockdown after an initial quarantine of a dozen small towns in Lombardy and Veneto failed to stop the spread of the virus. On Thursday, Italy idled all non-essential production and industry, the most widespread manufacturing shutdown in the world.
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