BERGAMO – One year ago, Bergamo’s state-of-the-art Pope John XXIII Hospital verged on collapse as doctors struggled to treat 600 patients, with 100 of them in intensive care.
Army trucks ferried the dead from the city’s overtaxed crematorium in images now seared into the collective pandemic memory.
The picture is much improved now: The hospital is treating fewer than 200 virus patients, just one quarter of whom require intensive care.
But still unchanged as Italy’s death rate pushes upward once again is that the victims remain predominantly elderly, with inoculation drives stumbling in the country and elsewhere in Europe. “No, this thing, alas, I was not able to protect the elderly, to make clear how important it would be to protect the