Adozen physicians at the epicenter of Italy’s Covid-19 outbreak issued a plea to the rest of the world on Saturday, going beyond the heartbreaking reports of overwhelmed health care workers there and a seemingly uncontrollable death toll to warn that medical practice during a pandemic may need to be turned on its head — with care delivered to many patients at home.
“Western health care systems have been built around the concept of patient-centered care,” physicians Mirco Nacoti, Luca Longhi, and their colleagues at Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo urge in a paper published on Saturday in NEJM Catalyst, a new peer-reviewed journal from the New England Journal of Medicine. But a pandemic requires “community-centered care.”
The experience of the Bergamo doctors is crucial for U.S. physicians to understand “because some of the mistakes that happened in Italy can happen here,” said Maurizio Cereda, co-director of the surgical ICU at Penn Medicine and a co-author of the paper. The U.S. medical system is centralized, hospital-focused, and patient-centered, as in most western countries, “and the virus exploits this,” he told STAT.
Although Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital is a new state-of-the-art facility, its 48 intensive-care beds and other advanced treatment capacity have staggered under the Covid-19 caseload, which passed 4,305 this week.
“We are far beyond the tipping point,” Nacoti and his colleagues write. With 70% of ICU beds reserved for critically ill Covid-19 patients, those beds are being allocated only to those “with a reasonable chance to survive,” as physicians make wrenching triage choices to try to keep alive those who have a chance. “Older patients are not being resuscitated and die alone without appropriate palliative care, while the family is notified over the phone, often by a well-intentioned, exhausted, and emotionally depleted physician with no prior contact,” they report.
Most nearby hospitals in the wealthy region are “nearing collapse while medications, mechanical ventilators, oxygen, and personal protective equipment are not available,” the physicians write.
Other health care in northern Italy has come to a near-halt, they report: The system “struggles to deliver regular services, even pregnancy care and child delivery, while cemeteries are overwhelmed … [V]accination programs are on standby.”
