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Patients waiting for treatment at the hard-pressed Cotugno Hospital in Naples, Italy, were given oxygen in their cars at the weekend, Sky News reported.
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Images showed a queue of vehicles, which waited in the parking lot as medics wheeled out oxygen cylinders and fed tubes through the car windows.
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Italy, in the midst of a second wave, is seeing a surge in new coronavirus cases. On Wednesday, the country reported 33,000 new cases and 623 deaths.
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The nation was recently shocked by a video showing a patient found dead in the bathroom of a different Naples hospital.
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Patients in Naples, Italy, with suspected coronavirus were given oxygen in a hospital parking lot as they waited in their cars for treatment inside, Sky News reported.
Cars and ambulances in line outside Cotugno Hospital were attended by medical workers, who set up oxygen tanks for some patients with breathing difficulties at the weekend, the outlet reported.
This video, posted on Twitter by the Irish Times, shows the scene:
Cotugno Hospital is a specialist infectious diseases hospital which, during the pandemic’s first wave, took exceptional measures and was hailed as a “model hospital,” as Sky reported at the time.
Italy is going through a second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. The country reported 33,000 new cases and 623 deaths on Wednesday, approaching its previous record in March.
Italy’s Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said in a Facebook post that there was a need to “intervene immediately” in Campania, the region which contains Naples.
His post referred to a video that had spread widely of a suspected COVID-19 patient who had been found dead in the bathroom of another Naples hospital.
The situation is “reality here talking,” he said, describing the severity of the reports he was hearing from the region.
He described reports of “people treated in cars in parking lots,” of people dying in ambulances without emergency crews being assigned a hospital to go to, as well as “others that are not even taken from home despite constant calls.”
Campania is in the “yellow” zone of Italy’s three-tier color-coded risk categories, meaning there are only minimal lockdown restrictions in place, according to The Local Italy.
However, ministers are considering sending in military assistance and moving it to a more severe “orange” or “red” categorization by Friday, Il Mattino reported.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti said: “If there are widespread reports of critical issues on the health facilities of the city of Naples, we need to give a signal,” the paper reported.
As cases worsened nationwide in the second wave, new lockdown measures introduced on October 26 were greeted with violent protests in several major cities, including Naples.
Suspected COVID-19 patient’s body found in ER bathroom
At another Naples hospital, Antonio Cardarelli Hospital, a man receiving treatment for coronavirus was found dead in the bathroom of the emergency room, local newspaper Il Mattino reported.
The cause of death has not yet been certified, according to the paper. The body was found after hospital staff noticed he had been gone a long time, the paper reported.
A video showing the man’s body — taken minutes after his death — has spread widely online. The footage was snatched while hospital orderlies sought a stretcher to take the body away, the paper reported.
The director general of the hospital, Giuseppe Longo, said it is “regrettable” that the incident was “subject to exploitation aimed at building terrible and dangerous suggestions in public opinion,” the paper reported.
In his Facebook post, Di Maio said the images were “shocking.”
“The patient found dead in the bathroom at Cardarelli hospital is the rawest and most violent of numerous testimonies that come to me every day from Campania hospitals,” he continued.
Qayyah Moynihan contributed reporting to this story.
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