Italian mayors concerned coronavirus death toll doesn’t tell whole story

The priest gave a final benediction. There were no flowers, no embraces. Francesca Steffanoni and her mother hurried away from Bergamo’s main cemetery, their furtive farewell lasting no more than 5 minutes.

Bergamo is the epicenter of the hardest-hit province of Italy’s hardest-hit region, Lombardy, the site of hundreds of coronavirus deaths. Families here are deprived of a bedside farewell with virus-stricken loved ones, or even a traditional funeral, and the cemetery is so overwhelmed by the number of dead that military trucks transported 65 bodies to a neighboring region for cremation this week.

Steffanoni had taken her mother to watch as the coffin containing an 82-year-old relative — a widower with a heart condition, struck down with the virus — was driven inside the imposing gates. They wore masks and gloves; they kept their distance.

“In theory, we should not have gone. But it was one of her last relatives who remains,” Steffanoni said.

According to unofficial figures, more than 600 people infected with the virus have died in the province, which is tucked up against the Italian Alps and accounts for more than a quarter of all deaths in Lombardy, even though it represents only a tenth of the region’s population of 10 million.

“We are confronting the biggest COVID emergency after Wuhan,” said Dr. Luca Lorini, head of intensive care at Bergamo’s main hospital, named for native son Pope John XXIII, where nearly 500 beds are dedicated to people suffering severe symptoms of the virus, 80 of those in intensive care. “The numbers tell us this.”

But the numbers thus far don’t tell the whole story.

Source: Read Full Article