Italy's national numbers are 'unusable for any statistical purpose' and don't take into account deaths in nursing homes
In the early days of March, when northern Italy faced a severe health crisis from the coronavirus outbreak, the scarcity of available hospital beds brought the public health system to its knees.
Italian authorities have started investigations into nursing home deaths during the outbreak and police seized documents related to the Pio Albergo Trivulzio in Milan, a historic nursing home with over 1,000 elderly residents, and 13 other nursing homes in the region. The Public Prosecutor's Office in Milan is investigating the matter. The charge is a culpable epidemic and multiple culpable homicides.
The governor of Lombardy Attilio Fontana and the councillor for Welfare, Giulio Gallera are in the eye of the storm, but they claim that the technicians of the local Health Protection Agencies are the ones responsible for transferring Covid-19 patients from hospitals to care homes. "The epidemic arrived in our facility on March 13 – but we were not aware of that - when 17 patients from Sesto San Giovanni hospital were admitted with the aim of easing the pressure on hospitals that no longer had beds," Pietro La Grassa, health worker and trade unionist of Trivulzio in Milan explained to"On the 17 on March we placed them in a non-Covid ward: we were not afraid because we were told by the hospital administration that they were not infected.
For a long time, Covid-19 patients were not isolated and coexisted with others, the elderly. Until April 16, swabs were not available, so residents fell ill without knowing whether they had been infected or not. Their dead simply slipped off the official figures.
"Besides, they work on specific care fields: cardiology, oncology, surgery, neglecting emergency and intensive care. This system needs people to be sick to keep on running.""We had a frontline protection network that is made of our general practitioners, a prevention and control form that the world envied. For every citizen or migrant - regular or irregular – there is a doctor to establish a direct relationship with," he says.
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