As virus hits Italy's south, some flee troubled health care
GIUGLIANO IN CAMPANIA, Italy (AP) — Patients, some wrapped in blankets that look like they came from home, moan in their beds. What appears to be medical tubing and a wad of gauze or paper towels litter the floor of San Giuliano public hospital, which treats coronavirus patients in a bleak town in Italy's Neapolitan hinterland.
In another surreptitiously filmed scene, 15 kilometers (9 miles) away in Naples, an elderly man suspected of having COVID-19 takes his last, labored breaths in a bathroom at the emergency room of Cardarelli Hospital, his undignified end memorialized on a phone camera by a fellow patient and posted online.
Meanwhile, outside the ER entrance for Cardarelli, the main health care facility for densely populated Naples, those desperate for oxygen for loved ones line up in their cars, waiting for nurses to bring tanks of the life-saving element to ailing passengers anxious to enter the crowded ER.
The pandemic, which has killed more than 46,000 people in Italy, has heightened the urgency of the plight of those seeking medical care in public hospitals in the country's economically underdeveloped south. But these glimpsed moments of drama, while shocking, are nothing new to people here who depend on such care.
In late September, as coronavirus infections surged in Italy after a summer decline, prosecutors put 17 hospital managers and workers under investigation for an insect infestation at a Naples hospital. Cardarelli, meanwhile, was once accused by the consumer group Codacons of leaving patients crowded in corridors like they were “old boxes.”
Naples prosecutors are investigating the bathroom death at Cardarelli, and the hospital’s director has ordered an internal probe. At San Giuliano, hospital officials declined to speak to an AP reporter who visited Saturday, and there was no immediate...
