"Our beards will grow back" in depth report from frontline of Virus in Milan (RTe)
RTÉ
March 21,2020
By Mario Calabresi Former editor of La Repubblica and La Stampa newspapers
The Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, founded in the late 1920s as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, before becoming a university hospital in 1974, is the point of reference for epidemiological emergencies in northern Italy. It is the first hospital to have been fully converted to deal with the coronavirus, which causes the respiratory disease Covid-19.
Antonio Castelli, 56, head of the Resuscitation Unit at the Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan... I went into the Emergency Room, it was literally bursting with patients with serious respiratory problems. They were everywhere, and when I say everywhere, I mean not an inch of floor space was visible. The least serious case seemed to be a woman attached to an oxygen respirator; someone had hung a bottle of water onto her gurney, a detail which struck me as particularly humane. The place was overflowing, 70 men and women so cramped they could barely breathe. But it wasn't chaotic; it was strangely ordered, the commitment to duty was palpable. I'll never forget it."
The chief medic of the Emergency Room, Stefano Paglia, had been there for eight days. He hadn't once set foot outside during this period. He communicated with his wife and daughters through WhatsApp, and managed to snatch a couple of hours sleep between one wave of incoming patients and another. There were two waves of admissions per day, a dozen or so patients at a time, either in the early morning or at sundown...Antonio Castelli met the entire staff: "Their faces were drained, exhausted, they felt no one was grasping the severity of the problem. I told them that I wasn't there to check up on them, just to bear witness to the incredible work they were doing. I want people to know what they did in Lodi, when the town of Codogno was already on lockdown: their accomplishment was pure heroism, and I don't use that term lightly, as so many people do nowadays. They quite literally were heroes. As they were filling me in on the situation, I was almost moved to tears by the resilience and competence of that team of doctors and nurses."
...We all had beards in my ward; we shaved them off that morning so that our masks could adhere more securely. But every day in our WhatsApp resuscitators group, I repeat: 'Remember that we'll get our beards back. When it's all over - because this will all be over - we'll grow them back.'"
So much more here. A must read.
https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0320/1124458-our-beards-will-grow-back-on-the-virus-frontline/
