As bad as some of the news is about this outbreak, I think in the end it's a good thing, because certainly there are far more deadlier things in the shadows -- you might say this is preparing us.
This is like a war...
Medical staff in Italy and Spain are struggling with a shortage of supplies and also getting infected themselves.
www.bloomberg.com
Excerpts:
Europe’s Desperate Doctors Are Shielded by Trash Bags
At some Spanish hospitals, doctors and nurses resort to taping garbage sacks to their arms to shield themselves while they work to save an avalanche of patients fighting for breath. They’ve run out of disposable coats.
The plastic glasses they wear are of such poor quality that medics can barely see through them, so they find the pulses and veins of coronavirus patients by touch, said Samantha Gonzalez, a 52-year-old nurse who works in the emergency room at the Txagorritxu hospital in the Basque city of Vitoria.
With Italy overtaking China as the
most deadly center of the pandemic and Spain recording its grimmest day yet for fatalities, health care in the two countries is buckling in a way not seen in peacetime.
How they are trying to cope with the crisis is already a
worrying lesson for other European countries as the harried ranks of doctors and nurses become depleted by contagion and efforts to find space and breathing aids for patients look increasingly futile. Finding space for the dead is also tougher. Italy has brought in the army.
Hospitals in Italy and
now Spain have been overwhelmed by the scale of admissions but more importantly the speed. Staff have watched the number of known cases multiply five-fold or more in just a couple of weeks and are scrambling to dedicate wards previously used for geriatric care or dermatology to coronavirus sufferers.
