Brescia, too many people infected by Coronavirus: “We cannot cure everybody, some of them stay home”

Brescia is the province which has mostly been affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. Hospitals are now full, and there now is a queue of ambulances outside the emergency rooms, continuously carrying more and more infected people even from the province of Bergamo, where the situation already was catastrophic during the last days. “The few places left are in the intensive care unit - as local physicians told us- and they are left to those who have more chances of survival”. “One of the standards we look at to hospitalize people- tells us Germano Bettoncelli, general physician from the province of Brescia - apart from high fever and respiratory failure, is the oxygen saturation, meaning the concentration of oxygen in the blood that we measure. “The respiratory diseases guidelines tell us that when you have a saturation level which is lower than 92, 90, the patient must be hospitalized. I had patients who stayed home with a saturation level which was less than 80, and who have been hospitalized when it reached 70, meaning that you are on the line between life and death”. We do not manage to cure everybody - tells us the pneumology expert - we do not get o guarantee respiratory assistance and support, since the number of devices is limited, it is clear that a selection is made at the hospital. Sometimes managing to have the older patients with more diseases hospitalized has been difficult, I had one of my patients with Coronavirus symptoms dying at home.