The report below is hard to fathom. What could the officials have been thinking? If they were thinking at all? Keeping in mind reacting out of fear equals stupid, deadly decision making. More likely, thinking of technocratic governments, it cannot be discounted the idea there was one taken with malicious intent. Killing two birds with one stone? Very CLEARLY the results of this decision would have been known and understood before this decision was acted upon.
In the early days of March, when northern Italy was faced with a serious health crisis from the coronavirus outbreak, the scarcity of available hospital beds brought the public health system to its knees.
On March 8, a resolution by Attilio Fontana, president of the Lombardy region – Italy’s economic engine and the epicenter of the epidemic with 12,213 deceased - sentenced hundreds of elderly people ( ←the order as issued) hosted in nursing homes to death.
The regional resolution offering150 euros ($163) to nursing homes for accepting Covid-19 patients to ease the burden on hospitals, contributed to the uncontrolled spread of the virus among health workers and elderly guests, turning these institutions into virus hotbeds.
Hosting Covid-19 patients in nursing homes was like lighting a match in a haystack.
“We read it twice, we did not want to believe what we read," says Luca Degani, president of UNEBA, the trade association that brings together about 400 rest homes in the region, "the virus affects everyone indistinctly, but its lethality and gravity takes a very significant logarithmic curve if people are aged and suffer multiple pathologies.”
“The fact that in our facilities we had people at greatest risk was a fact that had to be considered,” Degani explains to TRT World, “These structures are made to let the elderly socialise and be provided with adequate care. They are not made to respond to an acute disease caused by a pandemic infection.”
At least 1,822 people died in nursing homes in Lombardy, yet it is not known how many were actually killed by coronavirus as many were never swabbed.
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.
Coffins have been piling up inside the church at Trivulzio care home where 150 health workers, in a letter, accused the management of being aware of the dangers but not having reacted promptly.
Until March 23, there were no protocols in place, whatsoever. Health workers reportedly assisted residents without personal protection equipment (PPE) and those with symptoms were not even isolated from others.
The relatives of the victims and of those still hosted at Trivulzio health facility have come together to ask for justice and are ready to file a class action lawsuit. The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Milan is investigating the matter. The charge is culpable epidemic and multiple culpable homicide.
“Besides support statements, I have also received numerous testimonies from family members of patients who, as in my case, have encountered serious and worrying deficiencies in the management of the health emergency that exploded inside the structure,” said Alessandro Azzoni, founder and spokesperson of the Justice and Truth Committee for the victims of Trivulzio, where at least 190 resident have died. “I am very concerned about the health of my mother - still a guest of the facility - whom, like so many other patients, is in a state of current danger,” he said. He expressed hope that the prosecutor will intervene promptly and also consider entrusting the management of the structure to a judicial administrator.
The governor of Lombardy Attilio Fontana and the councilor 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.
Meanwhile, over 50,000 signatures have been collected in just a few days to place the regional health administration under 'receivership' (outside management).
A massacre
Last Friday Silvio Brusaferro, chief of the Higher Health Institute (ISS), said that the “carnage” in nursing homes all over Italy has claimed 7,000 victims since February, of which at least 40 percent died due to coronavirus.
“What has happened and is still happening in residences for the elderly is a massacre,” says Ranieri Guerra, deputy director of the World Health Organization and a consultant with the Italian Ministry of Health.
“The epidemic arrived in our facility on March 13 – but we were not aware of that - when 17 patients from Sesto San Giovanni hospital (on the outskirts of Milan) 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 TRT World.
“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. Since then, the contagion has started spreading among doctors, nurses and health workers. In the blink of an eye it reached, of course, the residents of the structure: the elderly.”
Last Thursday, Corrado Formigli, a well-known TV investigative journalist in Italy, in his “Piazza Pulita” a prime-time television broadcast, openly referred to a “massacre going on in nursing homes”.
“Due to the ineptitude of someone, we have become a hotbed of the disease," says La Grassa, "while it was immediately clear that elderly with pre-existing pathologies were the most vulnerable subjects in this epidemic, it was decided to turn care homes into Covid houses. We do not have intensive care and emergency rooms, what care could we provide?
“An absolutely unjustifiable conduct,” comments Vittorio Agnoletto, former member of the European Parliament and occupational doctor.
“As early as March 8, in addition to having identified the virus and its transmission pattern, we knew quite clearly how it affects fragile people and mainly kills those over 70 years old. We knew exactly that nursing homes’ guests were the ideal victims of Covid-19,” he tells TRT World.
Additional Excerpts:
“The entire health model that delegates 40 percent of public health expenses to the private sector must be questioned. These private structures work on treatment, not on prevention, because the former brings gains and the latter does not,” he says. “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.”
Yet, the virus wave arrived and crashed on the hospitals that could not cope with the load because, over the years, we have progressively cut beds reaching the lowest European average,” says Agnoletto, “We channeled the wave exactly on the most fragile subjects, creating clusters.”
Read the entire article at the link provided! This could only have been intended in my opinion.