“We went out without tampons.” The day the virus exploded

We publish an excerpt from The black book of the coronavirus (Historica Edizioni, 350 pages, 20 euros), written by Giuseppe De Lorenzo and Andrea Indini.

In the following days, at the hospital in Alzano Lombardo, a head nurse and a head nurse will also become positive. And it is the first aid that ends up in the eye of the storm because, after the first alarming results of the swabs, it is closed for sanitation, but after only a couple of hours it is reopened. It all happens, within a few hours, on the morning of February 23rd. Delia, a resident of Nembro, has both parents hospitalized for several days. Come and visit them with her husband to help them eat. Giovanni, the father, who has had very high blood sugar for a few days, is in a state of confusion. At a certain point on the cell phone of a fellow villager, also in the ward to assist loved ones, a message arrives in which there is talk of two cases of coronavirus in the hospital. Only then do they realize that the coming and going of the nurses has become more and more frenetic and that the tension is increasing by the minute. When the husband of Delia he tries to go home, on the second flight of stairs he is stopped by the nurses and sent back. Official communication is late in arriving. In the meantime, however, the exit doors are sealed and the relatives of the sick are provided with surgical masks. Outside you can glimpse the throng of those who come for visits. Through the windows they try to exchange the little information they manage to put together. They have no certainties. But, when they see journalists and cameramen waiting outside the Pesenti Fenaroli entrance from the windows, they understand that the situation is really serious.

At about five in the afternoon, the nurses swoop into the ward rooms. “Pull up all your stuff – intimidate – and get out of here.” There is no time even to say hello to relatives. Delia’s husband tries to buy time. “I can’t – he explains – there’s my father-in-law in the bathroom.” «He absolutely must go away – they insist – leave him there, as soon as we have time, we will take care of him». «We didn’t even manage to say goodbye …» Delia confides with regret, who, together with her husband, leaves the hospital without any kind of control. The hypothesis of subjecting them to the swab is not even formulated. “Go directly home – is the suggestion given to them – wash your clothes and take a shower.” The nurses are limited only to making them pass through a secondary exit to avoid the crowd that, in the meantime, has formed at the entrance. «It almost seemed we were going to escape …», they tell us. Chaos reigns everywhere. The feelings of the Morotti are confirmed in the testimony of Nadeem Abu Siam, a 29-year-old Palestinian doctor who is expected to work the night shift on 23 February. At 5 pm the first phone call arrives: “We are closed, do not come to the hospital”. Two hours later the phone rings again. They tell him he has to show up for work. «As soon as he entered, no one knew what to do – he confides – the flow of patients was still stopped. Until that moment we had never used masks in a generalized way and in all we had about ten tampons ».

In addition, over the next three days, Delia continues to go back and forth to the hospital to bring the replacement to both parents. On February 27, the 82-year-old mother was discharged because the swab was negative. His, however, will turn out to be a false negative. On the 28th, however, it is the father who tests positive. The nightmare of the Morotti family had begun, however, at the beginning of the month, around 10 February, when Giovanni was taken for the first time to the emergency room of They rise. He has a fever and a cough takes his breath away. Lung radiographs reveal an onset of outbreak. However, he was discharged with antibiotic treatment. In the meantime, his wife also begins to feel ill and she is immediately arranged for hospitalization at Pesenti Fenaroli. Giovanni’s condition also worsens day by day, despite the medicines he is taking. “His mouth got sick,” explains Danilo, Delia’s brother. He completely loses his sense of taste and a violent candidiasis takes away his appetite. Therefore, on 21 February they return to the hospital and here the doctors are concerned above all with the values ​​of diabetes. Hence the decision to hospitalize him.

Delia and Danilo get to see their 85-year-old father one last time March 9, the night before he dies. “Your dad is very serious,” says the doctor in a phone call in the middle of the night. “You can say goodbye to him if you want, but don’t touch anything … not even the bed.” On his head he no longer even has a helmet, the C-dad. He only has a mask. «I tried to call him two or three times – Delia tells us – but he never answered me». Doctors have already started giving him morphine. “To die of suffocation is not worthy of a human being,” a doctor patiently explains. “It would be like drowning … so don’t worry we’ll accompany him with morphine.” For another twenty-four hours he will go on fighting between life and death. «In my opinion – Delia cut short – of that department there, very few are still alive …». On March 13, the mother also gets worse. This time theambulance takes her to the emergency room of the hospital Seriate. The doctors will not even take her to the ward: she will die there three days later. “In the meantime I got sick with bilateral pneumonia”, Danilo tells us, who will never be swab. “It is not necessary – they explain – since he has no respiratory crisis”. To recover, in addition to antibiotics, a doctor from the San Raffaele hospital in Milan also prescribes an antimalarial which, within a couple of days, turns off the fever. Delia also gets sick, but in a very mild form. Together with her also the other sister and the niece.

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