BornOnShorehamStreet
Well-Known Member
A friend of mine I went to school with emigrated to Italy thirty years ago. He works as a doctor at a hospital in Bozen, South Tirol. They are currently experiencing the start of the more serious wave of cases, but are nothing as bad yet as in, say, Milano.
He says it is like nothing he has ever known because doctors that have never really seen themselves as making large-scale decisions about life or death on an industrial scale are increasingly placed in a position to just do that. The mild cases are just that, mild. Then there are cases that a person will clearly survive with certain discomfort, if only they are given the beds or the respirators. And then there are tons of people who need more service than can be offered to all. So you are having to chance it with several patients each day, knowing your decision who gets machinery for how long will have severe consequences for the ones without access. Death being one of those potential consequences.
That does not yet touch on the ethics of quarantining healthy people who carry the virus on the staff if civilization in the hospital is stretched or breaking down. He says that there are now areas of Italy where doctors who carry it or have mild symptoms still work in order to stem the ballooning figures. It IS a horrible situation, the like of which he has not experienced before, having been born in the late sixties.
Now the Italians may have been tardy or unprepared. Unlike other countries they also probably never knew patient 1, let alone patient 1 to 100. So they could not contain it early or trace it once it raised its head.
But he is awaiting his own test result today as a colleague tested positive. So his advice was to take it seriously early on as the hard cases of the ones who do not make it are nasty deaths. They are in pain breathing, with their lungs filling up with slime that you need to get out with machinery or you literally die of not having enough oxygen in your body.
In his words, it is not as much the disease itself as the flood of same symptoms of something normally relatively rare or contained that strangles the life out of the staff and the system.
While the numbers are still low, personally, I would limit my non-vital fun. I probably would currently forfeit the movies. I walk or cycle to work even on grey and horrible days, rather than public transport. But the stuff that makes my life happy and is needed to compensate for the pain of existing - notably, taking the kids to their various fun activities and sports, the odd concerts I have tickets for and the Blades matches - I will only stop engaging in if I either have first hand experience of the kind of squeeze my friend describes or the state takes the decision out of my hand.
This is very interesting, thank you. I have just one query. What's this machine that can remove slime (I presume you mean the natural mucus we all have that multiplies when infected) from lungs.
If the machine you are referring to is a ventilator,it doesn't remove mucus. I have had a chronic lung condition since 1957 and I don't know of any machine that removes mucus from lungs. I'd be very interested if there is such a machine