Covid today Italy, intensive care alert: “Serious signs”

The fourth wave of covid in Italy risks sending the intensive care units into crisis: actions and rules are needed before the regions go into the yellow zone due to the increase in hospitalizations. “The reaching of 10 thousand new cases of people infected with covid 19, with + 95% hospitalizations and + 8% of presences in intensive care are increasingly serious and important signals that indicate that we are now in the fourth wave” , is the alarm launched by Antonino Giarratano, president of the Italian Society of Anesthesia, analgesia, resuscitation and intensive care (Siaarti). “We ask the government to immediately implement the necessary measures for greater social and health care, without waiting for the ‘yellow’ color which already means 15% more hospitalizations and new deaths”, suggests Siaarti. “With these figures and with this worrying trend, which falls in the autumn and winter period when the critical areas are already under pressure, within a month the hospital system of intensive care risks dangerously clogging”. Read also “It must certainly be said that fortunately we are not in the dramatic situation we experienced last winter: today we have vaccines that are importantly defending the health of millions of Italians. This – continues Giarratano – means that today the hospitalized they are above all people who have refused vaccination and others who instead – even if vaccinated – have particularly fragile conditions and high risk factors and are coming out after 10 months of full coverage from the infection. But this situation will soon add to the flu seasonal which causes about 8,000 deaths among the most fragile patients and which in the next few weeks will begin to circulate in our country leading to a crowding of dangerous and probably unsustainable hospitalizations “.” It must be repeated clearly: following hospitalization in intensive care patients they have a 30 to 75% chance of death – warns President Siaarti – We must avoid this type of hospitalization as much as possible. Our appeal as a scientific society of anesthetists-resuscitators, and therefore of the professionals who more than anyone has lived and lives the pandemic on the front line, is therefore clear and precise: we ask all Italians to get vaccinated and those vaccinated for more than 6 months. to take the third dose – remembering that a few million Italians have not yet even done the first for different reasons, sometimes ideological, other times for fears – and to adhere with extreme attention to the prevention rules, I am referring to the use of masks and frequent disinfection of the hands “.” In the presence of increasing numbers of hospitalizations we will have to reserve places in intensive care for Covid-19 patients, thus reducing the beds available for chronic exacerbated, surgical and cancer patients, cardiopaths, polytraumatized and all those with acute syndromes that compromise vital functions “, observes President Siaarti.” We are all invested with the respo organizational, personal and social ability that this situation is avoided. For this reason, we hope that all over the country the timing of decisions on strengthening the vaccination campaign will be speeded up, even with a third dose: today we cannot afford to undermine all the immense work that, in particular in Italy, health professionals and health organizations on the territory have accomplished so far. We consider with great attention a worrying fact: with clogged intensive care, next year we could be forced to the tragic count of many deaths among non-Covid patients.19 due to delayed or lack of assistance “, concludes Giarratano.