MILAN: It took Ms Silvia Bertuletti 11 days of frantic phone calls to persuade a doctor to visit her 78-year-old father Alessandro, who was gripped by fever and struggling for breath. When an on-call physician did go to her house near Bergamo, at the...
Interviews with families, doctors and nurses in Italy's stricken Lombardy region indicate that Ms Bertuletti's experience is not uncommon, that scores are dying at home as symptoms go unchecked and that phone consultations are not always enough.
A spokesman for the state-run ATS health agency in Bergamo said the authorities in the Lombardy region, rated among the world's most efficient for health services, told family doctors to"deal with patients by phone as much as possible", limiting home visits"to reduce contagion and waste of protective equipment".
Mr Pietro Zucchelli, director of the Zucchelli funeral home that serves several villages in the Seriana Valley around Bergamo, said that over the past two weeks more than 50 per cent of his job had been collecting bodies from people's homes.
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