Dispatches from a pandemic: One ER doctor in Italy compares fighting the coronavirus to 'operating in a war zone.'
Roberto Rizzardi is a doctor who has been running the emergency room of San Matteo hospital, in Pavia, 25 miles south of Milan, for 25 years. He has been catapulted onto the front line of the ‘war’ against coronavirus — this is his story.
“ ‘My experience in Africa has taught me how to keep calm in extreme times. But I would never have imagined seeing it here.’ ” As one of the first who faced the tsunami of infection in Lombardy, northern Italy, Rizzardi had to rethink the space in his ward. “ ‘When even your face is covered with a mask and a visor, you are not able to eat, drink or even go to the toilet for several hours.’ ”“In the first days of emergency, after two weeks of overuse, our central oxygen system was about to crash out,” he said. “We had to put a sort of bypass, in order to save oxygen and to distribute it widely to more patients. The problem was fixed in a few hours.”
Rizzardi came up with a solution, nominating one person to man the phone and then equipping everyone else with walkie-talkies that broadcast the audio. The cost to Rizzardi of acting on the front line during the most complicated weeks of the epidemic was the sacrifice of his own health. After three weeks of seemingly never-ending shifts, Rizzardi caught the virus and was forced to halt his activity.
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