Coronavirus: Italy's hardest-hit city wants you to see how COVID-19 is affecting its hospitals.
The sheer number of people succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital in northern Italy. The sheer number of people succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital in northern Italy. The staff frantically wave us out of the way, pushing gurneys carrying men and women on mobile respirators - it's not chaos, but it is hectic. Masked, gloved and in a hazmat suit, my team and I are led through corridors full of gasping people who look terribly ill. The sheer number of people succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital in northern Italy - and it could easily overwhelm the rest of the country as well. In groups, they crowd around the latest patients. Attaching monitors, drips and most importantly respirators. Without them, the patients will simply go downhill fast.
Really fast. Deadly fast.
The staff is working flat out trying to keep their patients from deteriorating further. They are trying to stop them from dying.
I ask what ward I am in. "This isn't really a ward, it's a waiting room, we just have to use every bit of space," my guide, Vanna Toninelli, head of the hospital press office tells me. It looks like an intensive care unit (ICU), but it is actually just an emergency arrivals ward. The ICU is full. The people being treated are new arrivals, but they look far worse than that.
"This isn't really a ward, it's a waiting room, we just have to use every bit of space," my guide, Vanna Toninelli, head of the hospital press office tells me.
The medical teams are fighting a war here and they are losing.
They rush past wards already rammed with beds all filled with people in terrible distress - gasping for air, clutching at their chests and at tubes pumping oxygen into their oxygen-starved lungs. 
I'm in the main hospital in Bergamo, the hardest-hit hospital in Italy in the hardest-hit town in the hardest-hit province, Lombardy - and it's just plain scary.
The Italian city of Bergamo, one of the worst-hit by the coronavirus outbreak, is having to transport its dead out of the city as its crematorium is struggling to cope.Army vehicles have been brought in to move dozens of coffins from Bergamo to other regions, according to Ansa news agency.
The wealthy city, northeast of Milan in Italy's Lombardy region, has recorded at least 93 coronavirus-related deaths as cases continue to grow relentlessly.
Coronavirus: Italy's hardest-hit city wants you to see how COVID-19 is affecting its hospitals |
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