A mural depicts a nurse embracing the shape of Italy posted on the hospital of Pope John XXIII in solidarity with the health workers in Bergamo.
Photo: CNS Staff at the Pope John XXIII hospital in Bergamo – once the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy – have announced that they have no more patients with coronavirus in their intensive care unit.
After 137 days of trying to keep critically ill patients alive, staff gathered for a moment of silence to remember those who passed away in their wards, followed by applause for the more than 400 hospital workers in the department.
Maria Beatrice Stasi, director general of the hospital, told reporters they had discharged the last patient to recover from Covid-19, marking “a moment of great emotion” and relief as the intensive care unit can now accommodate other patients and staff can return to their regular uniforms.
At the worst point of the crisis, which began with their first patient being admitted on February 23, the ICU had more than 100 patients intubated.
Exceptional effort
Luca Lorini, head of the intensive care and reanimation department, told reporters that the exceptional effort and teamwork by staff led them to the “great result” of having no more Covid-19 patients in their unit.
“We had the courage to tell the truth” about the numbers of critically ill people they were treating, he said, and “what we did during this [early] phase saved a piece of the world,” he told Bergamo News. “We showed we could do it with the little information and resources we had” at the start of the outbreak, but now “we must not be unprepared, we must prepare for a future that no scientist can foresee, but we must be ready for another return of Covid,” he said.
“People must maintain an attitude of caution; it will do no harm to keep washing hands or wear a face mask until we get to zero infections, zero patients and zero dead” from the coronavirus, he told the newspaper.
Meanwhile, staff at the San Donato hospital in Milan, which cared for 600 Covid-19 patients, has reported no new positive cases admitted to the hospital in the past three weeks.