Uncounted among coronavirus victims, deaths sweep through Italy’s nursing homes
MILAN: As the official death toll from Italy’s coronavirus outbreak passes 2,500, a silent surge in fatalities in nursing homes, where dozens of patients a day are dying untested for the virus, suggests the real total may be higher.
Official data show that nearly 30,000 people have been confirmed as positive for the coronavirus in Italy, the highest number outside China where the virus first emerged.
But strict testing rules mean only patients hospitalized with severe symptoms are normally being swab tested.
While no detailed data is available, officials, nurses and relatives say there has been a spike in nursing home deaths in the worst affected regions of northern Italy since the virus emerged, and they are not showing up in coronavirus statistics.
“There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn’t been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren’t swabbed,” said Giorgio Gori, mayor of the town of Bergamo.
Gori said there had been 164 deaths in his town in the first two weeks of March this year, of which 31 were attributed to the coronavirus. That compares with 56 deaths over the same period last year.
Even adding the 31 coronavirus deaths to that total would leave 77 additional deaths, an increase that suggests the virus may have caused significantly more deaths than officially recorded.
Emilio Tanzi, director of Cremona Solidale, a 460-bed residence in the northern town of Cremona, said nursing homes were on the front lines of a crisis that predominantly affected the elderly, who nevertheless have not had adequate support.
He said there had been a significant and “anomalous” increase in deaths since about March 2, when the spread of the epidemic began to gather pace in Italy.
But there was no way of knowing for sure whether they were due to COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus, he added.
Tanzi declined to give full numbers, but said on just one day last week there had been 18 deaths at his facility of patients with respiratory difficulties – symptoms associated with the coronavirus.
“We don’t know if there have been coronavirus deaths because the swabs haven’t been done,” he said. “We’ve certainly seen high fevers and breathing difficulties.”
“If we’d been in a position to know, we could have isolated these patients properly and avoided the epidemic.”
‘ABANDONED’
Immediately after the virus emerged in northern Italy on Feb. 21, care homes cut off access to visitors to limit the contagion risk to elderly patients most vulnerable to the disease.
Walter Montini, president of ARSAC, the association grouping 30 old people’s homes in Cremona province, said that at one small care home with 36 beds, there were 7 deaths in a day.
“There has obviously been an increase in deaths. You just have to look at the local daily (newspaper) in Cremona. Normally there’s a page of death notices. Today there were five.”
He launched an appeal for more masks for staff on March 2 but, given the shortages, hospitals were judged to have a greater need. He said staff needed to be tested but that was not happening.
Local health authorities say they have received government directions on testing and treatment which say that hospitalization is only indicated for patients with “significant respiratory symptoms.”
They say that so-called Residenze Sanitarie Assistenziali, or extended care residences, have qualified medical staff on hand able to take care of patients.
One nurse in an extended care facility in a small town in the area of Cremona believes the homes “have been abandoned.”
In her section, out of 40 people, 38 were in bed with high fevers, while care staff were forced to work without proper protective clothing. But with local hospitals already close to being overwhelmed by the thousands of new cases reported every day, transfers were proving impossible to organize.
REUTERS
