Nava, chief of respiratory and critical care at Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Hospital in Bologna, saw one of the world's biggest outbreaks.
To cope with the influx of patients, most of the wards at Sant’Orsola Hospital were converted into coronavirus units. Nava and his colleagues also took the time to train hospital personnel in other divisions how to effectively use personal protective equipment, such as masks and face shields, and how to supply oxygen to patients.
Even with help from other divisions, plus doctors and nurses who volunteered from other regions of Italy, Nava said hospital resources were stretched thin. “Our daily work hours increased to 14, 16, sometimes 18 hours a day,” he said. “I remember going home at 11 p.m. and starting work again at 7 a.m.” In some cases, health care systems in Italy — particularly in the country’s northern regions — came perilously close to their breaking point. “We were very close to the failure threshold,” said Roberto Cosentini, head of the emergency medicine unit at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, in Italy’s Lombardy region. “Our biggest fear was to fail as a system — not just from a professional point of view, but also from a human point of view. For a doctor, to feel useless is the worst thing.” Frontline workers were also making big sacrifices in their personal lives, with many opting to be separated from their families in order to protect them from being infected.His symptoms were moderate, but after weeks of treating people in intensive care and seeing many patients die alone — with him and his colleagues often being forced to relay the news to loved ones by Skype or FaceTime because relatives were barred from coming to the hospital — Nava knew not to underestimate the virus. “I would get this sudden sense of death,” he said. “I would be going to bed and think: I’m not sure if tomorrow morning I will be here.” Four others in Nava’s unit also contracted the virus, and he estimates about 2 percent of hospital personnel at Sant’Orsola got sick from late February through April. In June, Nava co-authored a, titled “An Italian sacrifice to the COVID-19 epidemic,” that detailed how 151 doctors and more than 40 nurses died during that stage of the pandemic and what other health care systems could learn from it. In the months since he was infected, Nava said he has mostly recovered. He still struggles with some fatigue, and his lungs are noticeably not at their pre-coronavirus capacity. “During strenuous exercise, I cannot reach what I was doing before,” he said, adding that he used to run three times a week. “I’m up to about 80 percent of what I used to do.”lingering symptom that other recovered patients have also describedIt’s likely too soon to know how the coronavirus may affect people over the long term, but some early studies have suggested that patients could suffer from respiratory, heart and even neurological problems long after they’ve recovered from the disease.“The disease taught us one important thing: medicine is a probabilistic science,” he said. “In medicine, 1+1 may give you 3 because something unpredictable can really screw things up.”“It brought us back down to Earth a bit. Doctors now have incredible medicine and robots doing surgical procedures, and then all of a sudden a small virus changed everything,” he said. “It changed my life because I got the sense of being mortal.”
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