The past four days have personally been quite boring, I slept, cleaned and had more chocolate than I am willing to admit. That’s what life in quarantine looks like if you are not sick. For Italian doctors and nurses, it’s however very different. Hundreds of COVID-19 patients are admitted to hospital every day (bear in mind that only those who are in critical condition, i.e. are on the verge of respiratory failure, are actually admitted to the hospital) and hundreds of patients sadly pass away every day. While the popular opinion is that the novel coronavirus is just a “simple flu” even I, with absolutely no medical experience, can tell you that it simply is not. First of all, we can cure the flu, there is medicine for it and there is a vaccine. Do I get the flu shot every year? No. Do my grandparents get it as soon as they can? Yes. The flu is also not exactly something you want to get. It is reported that in Italy between 2018 and 2019, 809 cases of influenza were registered with 198 fatalities, which means 1 in 4 people died as a result of the flu. This shows that even if the novel coronavirus was “just” a highly contagious flu it would probably be in everyone’s best interest not to spread it around. Secondly, the novel coronavirus is NOT just a flu. The COVID-19 (the medical term used to define the disease which results from the novel coronavirus) causes a series of respiratory problems. In most extreme cases it leads to pneumonia which then leads to internal organ damage and respiratory failure.
Even if what I said so far didn’t make you a tiny bit concerned for your own health, the big, and I mean BIG, issue is the strain on the healthcare system. Now if anyone reading this is from the US then maybe you are used to not going to the doctor’s unless you are so sick that you can hardly get out of bed. On the other end we Italians are definitely not going to wait until the last moment to seek medical advice. That is, however, exactly what is happening right now in Northern Italy. There are thousands of cases of coronavirus in which patients are told to quarantine at home until their symptoms are unbearable. This, again, is not because our doctors have more fun treating terminally ill patients, but it is because even with every bed in every hospital designated to the ICU (intensive care unit) there are simply not enough beds and respirators to treat everyone. What does this mean? It means that doctors need to prioritise those with more critical conditions (which at this point means being close to being intubated) and the milder cases are left to quarantine at home. In the case that milder symptoms develop into more critical ones, patients are admitted to hospital but it might be too late as the symptoms are said to escalate very quickly.
The strain on the healthcare system is one of the reasons why China went into quarantine, it is one of the reasons why Spain and Italy are in quarantine, and it’s also the reason why South Korea has tested hundreds of thousands of people in order to isolate those who were infected (even in the early stages and those who had no symptoms). It is only if we manage to prevent this killer virus from spreading to thousands more people that we can make sure that as many patients can receive care as early as possible in the illness. Another issue with the coronavirus isn’t for those patients who are sick with it but also for those who are sick with other illnesses. Chances are that if you have a stroke during this pandemic, you might not receive as much medical attention as you would in normal times. Overcrowding is therefore the big issue with coronavirus which can be tackled if we stop or at least significantly slow down the spreading of the virus.
If the coronavirus spreads to 20, 30, 40 or more percent of the population then the whole healthcare system is going to collapse. In countries where the cases of coronavirus seem lower than in China or Italy, the hard truth is that people are not being tested for it. One of the reasons why the mortality rate in Italy is so high compared to China, is that tests have now slowed down as medical staff (plus students who graduated earlier and retirees who got called back into action) is working around the clock to try and tackle this emergency. This means that the percentage of deaths compared to the “known” cases of infections is higher as we are not registering as many infected as the real figure. While this lack of testing can be excused in Italy, in the UK, there have been cases of sick students on university campuses that were deemed too healthy to be tested. The point of this article really is to show what Italians are going through right now because the media and politicians around the world keep saying not to ‘panic’ as it would create chaos. However, as people are raiding supermarkets of toilet paper and markets are crashing it seems like it’s already chaos so we might as well panic and start taking this pandemic seriously. Obviously, I am not trying to shame anyone for going to work if your country has not shut down most shops and you do not have the possibility to work from home, however, if you can please do stay home and go out as little as possible. It’s much better if we can prevent other countries to go through what is happening in Italy instead of all being forced into quarantine because our healthcare system cannot sustain the impact this pandemic has caused.
