the times | Saturday November 14 2020 2GM 17
News
Maurizio di Mauro took three weeks to
win his personal battle with corona-
virus. As he returned to work at his hos-
pital in Naples he was facing a war.
The director of Cotugno hospital,
perched on a hill overlooking a stricken
city, resumed working this week amid
headlines about seriously ill victims
being fed oxygen by medics in the car
park after beds ran out.
“We found people in their cars with
pneumonia,” he told The Times. The
Red Cross is setting up a tent with oxy-
gen supplies to handle the patients.
Mr Di Mauro admits that he has no
idea how or why the virus can strike
hard or not at all, nor how he got it. “It’s
a strange monster,” he said. “I don’t
understand how some need a ventilator
in two hours and others don’t suffer. I
have always worn a mask and I have no
clue how I got it. Maybe I touched
something with the virus on it.”
The hospital director is at the centre
of Italy’s second wave of the disease,
which has put more than 33,000 people
in hospital, more than during the dark
months of March and April, and is kill-
ing about 600 a day.
The relief felt this spring as Italy’s
tough ten-week lockdown kept the
virus away from the underfunded
hospitals in the south has turned to
horror as Covid storms through
Campania, of which Naples is the
capital, with more than 2,000 in hospi-
tal and daily cases exceeding 4,000.
The city is not coping. Police were
called to the crowded Cardarelli hospi-
tal this week when a patient posted a
video of a suspected virus victim of 84
slumped dead in a lavatory and claimed
that he had been abandoned by staff.The government placed the city and its
region of Campania under partial lock-
down yesterday, along with Tuscany,
joining the other “red zones”, Lombar-
dy, Calabria, Piedmont and Valle
D’Aosta and the province of Bolzano.
“The health service has had since
March to get ready for this,” Luigi de
Magistris, 53, the mayor of Naples, said.
“So dead bodies and queues in cars are
unacceptable. Regular operations have
been put on hold for the past six weeks
and people with broken bones are stuck
at home.”
Hospitals in the Lazio region, Cam-
pania’s neighbour to the north which
includes Rome, reported dozens of
Covid-19 sufferers arriving in rented
ambulances from Campania this week
searching for a bed.
“The news coming out of the hospi-
tals is atrocious,” Chiara Landi, 26, said.
“I want to know why we haven’t lockedNews
The ‘strange monster’ spreading
fear in a city struggling to cope
down already.” The trainee magistrate
was joining the queue in Naples at a sta-
tion where 1,100 people are tested a day.
“I know two families who are totally
infected as well as my boyfriend’s sister
and now my mother, who has fever. I
am terrified she ends up in hospital.”
Further along the queue, Maria
Domenica Falciglia, 61, said that she
was testing because her son, a doctor at
Monaldi hospital, was positive. “I am
scared of being here,” she said, pointing
to others in the line huddled together.
Government advisers along with
Mr De Magistris and Vincenzo De
Luca, the regional governor, have been
calling for a lockdown. Many are asking
why it was left so late.
“It’s like an Agatha Christie mystery,”
Mr De Magistris said. He suspected
that government officials deciding the
fate of Naples had been fed over-
estimates of the number of hospital
beds. “Where are these beds?” he asked.
“The hospitals are full.”
The mayor blamed Mr De Luca, who
has responsibility for local healthcare,
and suggested that the false count was
given to conceal how little preparation
was undertaken for a second wave.
Mr De Luca, who has threatened to
break up gatherings with a flame-
thrower, has denied negligence and
threatened to sue his critics.
As politicians pointed fingers at each
other, Luca Liuzzi, 30, a male nurse, was
working hard to swab those in line at
the testing centre. After losing his
grandmother, 86, to Covid-19 in April
and watching his brother, who worked
alongside him at the centre, become
infected, Mr Liuzzi said that he risked
contagion every shift. “Everyone is
scared,” he said. “But my granny’s death
motivates me and I am not giving up.”Tom Kington NaplesVideo of an elderly patient lying dead
in a hospital lavatory provoked shockTELENEWS/EPANew infections take shine
off Slovakian mass testing
in late March, claimed that the number
of infectious people had fallen by 55 per
cent during the week between the two
rounds of testing.
However, the government’s own
figures show that the number of new
cases recorded on November 11 by PCR
testing was 2,591, higher than the 1,
reported a week earlier.
There are also divisions within Mr
Matovic’s cabinet over what to do next.
While Mr Matovic had said that the
experiment would allow Slovakia to
avoid a full lockdown, on Wednesday
the state of emergency was extended to
the end of the year.
When the prime minister said that
pubs, restaurants and other shuttered
businesses should organise their own
testing programmes if they wanted to
reopen, even some coalition partners of
his Ordinary People party were angry.
Richard Sulik, the economy minister
and leader of the right-wing Freedom
and Solidarity party, said: “The whole
of Slovakia didn’t put up with mass test-
ing because it’s obsessed with picking
its nose, but because it believed the pro-
mise that better times would follow.”
The opposition says it plans to launch
a referendum on early elections. Right-
wing groups have called for a mass
demonstration on November 17, when
the country celebrates the fall of
communism.
“We need a better strategic plan for
what happens now,” Andrej Matisak, a
journalist at Pravda, said. “No one
knows how the testing regime will be
expanded or how we are preparing for
another potential wave of infections.”In three days two-thirds of Slovakia’s
five million citizens were tested for
Covid-19 and tens of thousands of as-
ymptomatic carriers were identified
and placed in quarantine.
The government has hailed its
“moonshot” programme for helping to
bring the virus under control and yet
cases have continued to rise. Critics
have said that Slovakia’s attempt was
beset with problems and that the exten-
sion of a state of emergency was evi-
dence of its limitations.
The Slovakian authorities deployed
soldiers alongside nurses and doctors
to antigen testing centres around the
country. On October 31 and November
1 the centres tested 3.6 million of the
country’s 5.4 million people. Those who
tested negative were given certificates.
Those with positive results were or-
dered to go into isolation. Anyone who
is found outside without a certificate
faces a fine of up to €1,650 (£1,478).
In all, the antigen tests delivered
57,000 positive results, compared with
the 82,000 that had been confirmed by
the more reliable PCR tests, which
detect the virus’s genetic material, since
the start of the pandemic.
Some medical experts say the anti-
gen tests used by the state, which are
made in South Korea, may miss up to a
quarter of infections while wrongly
flagging others as carriers.
There is evidence that the pro-
gramme has failed to halt the rise in in-
fections. This week Igor Matovic, the
populist prime minister who took officeTim Gosling Praguefacing default. The Zambian
government had requested that
bondholders grant it a deferral of
interest payments until April as it
struggles with the the pandemic and a
limping economy. Its creditors
rejected that request earlier yesterday.serbia
Crowds gathered outside the Serbian
parliament to protest against a
proposed law that would make
vaccination against the coronavirus
mandatory. The bill has been
proposed by the government of
President Vucic, and a poll conducted
last month showed that 51 per cent of
Serbians who support his party would
be in favour of compulsory
vaccination. However, among
supporters of the opposition, 48 per
cent said that they would not accept a
coronavirus vaccination under any
circumstances.iran
Battling a third wave of the
coronavirus, Iran is considering
imposing a two-week total lockdown
in the capital, state media reported, as
the death toll from the disease rose by
461 to 40,121 yesterday. Iran is the
Middle Eastern country worst hit by
Covid-19. It had identified 11,737 new
cases yesterday.south korea
More than 300 drones lit up the sky
over Seoul yesterday in a show that
the government said was meant to
give “comfort and hope” during the
coronavirus pandemic. The drones
lined up in synchronised light
displays, forming multicoloured
images of people wearing masks and
promoting the government’s “Korean
New Deal” programme to rebuild the
economy.Virus found
at two Greek
mink farms
greece
The Greek authorities have found the
coronavirus in mink at two farms in
the north of the country, an
agriculture ministry official said. The
strain in the mink had not mutated,
the official said, adding that 2,
animals at one farm in the Kozani
region would be culled. The discovery
comes days after the Danish
authorities started culling their entire
population of 17 million mink, having
discovered a different strain of the
coronavirus in the animals.
united states
The Tesla founder Elon Musk said
that he had tested positive for the
coronavirus while also testing
negative, raising doubts over the
validity of the procedures. In a series
of tweets he said he had conflicting
results from rapid “antigen” tests for
the coronavirus after he had “mild
sniffles & cough & slight fever” in
recent days. “Something extremely
bogus is going on. Was tested for
covid four times today,” he wrote.
“Two tests came back negative, two
came back positive.” Mr Musk said he
planned to take the more accurate
PCR test, which must be sent to a
laboratory for analysis.
zambia
Zambia said it would not pay an
overdue Eurobond coupon by
yesterday’s deadline, putting it on
track to become Africa’s first
pandemic-era sovereign default. The
announcement came as the United
States, China and other G
countries agreed a common approach
for restructuring government debt as
the virus crisis leaves poorer nationsReported
new cases142,
48,
44,
37,
33,
32,
23,
22,
21,240,
163,
128,
96,
50,
43,
42,
40,
40,865
772
767
754750
730
6587501,Global deaths
1,290,US
Brazil
India
Mexico
UK
Italy
France
Spain
IranPeru
Spain
Brazil
Argentina
UK
Mexico
US
Italy
FranceWorld update
Global cases
52,487,1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9Most new casesCountries reporting most deathsDeaths per million population**Countries with populations greater than 20m. Source: WHOUS
Brazil
India
Italy
UK
France
Germany
Poland
Russia