Coronavirus: Video shows overwhelmed hospital ICU in Bergamo, Italy

• Warning: This post contains video of acute COVID-19 cases that some people may find distressing to watch.
• Footage from a hospital in Bergamo, Italy, shows medical workers struggling to deal with the city’s coronavirus crisis.
• Sky News broadcast images from a makeshift ICU ward in the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital Thursday.
• The video shows dozens of patients with plastic ventilation covers over their heads.
• Wards and corridors are packed, and doctors and nurses in protective gear are seen stretched to their limits.
• Bergamo is Italy’s worst-hit city, with 4,645 infections. Residents have been on a total lockdown since March 8.
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Stark footage from a hospital in Bergamo — the Italian city hit worst by the novel coronavirus — shows doctors and nurses desperately fighting to control the outbreak.

The video, broadcast Thursday by Sky News from the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital, shows an emergency-arrivals ward. It has been transformed into an intensive-care unit because the regular ICU is already full.

As of Friday morning, 4,645 people from Bergamo had tested positive for the virus, more cases than any other city or town in Italy, according to data published in the Corriere Della Sera newspaper. The exact number of deaths in Bergamo is not yet known.

Watch the Sky broadcast here:

The footage shows wards with more patients than they can handle. The staff seem overwhelmed.

The hospital’s head of emergency care, Dr. Roberto Cosentini, told Sky News: “It’s a very severe pneumonia, and so it’s a massive strain for every health system, because we see every day 50 to 60 patients who come to our emergency department with pneumonia, and most of them are so severe they need very high volumes of oxygen.”

He added: “And so we had to reorganize our emergency room and our hospital — three levels of intensive care.”

Most of the city’s public services are in crisis.

On Wednesday night, 15 Italian military trucks were seen ferrying about 60 bodies from morgues across the city to cremation sites in 12 other Northern Italian cities after Bergamo’s mayor called for aid.

Several morgues and Bergamo’s sole crematorium, which can cremate 25 people a day, are overwhelmed.

Prohibited from holding services, churches have been used to store coffins. The gymnasium at Ponte San Pietro Hospital was turned into a makeshift mortuary.

Residents have been confined to their homes since March 8, when the government quarantined millions of people in the region of Lombardy, which contains Bergamo.

The obituary pages of the L’Ecio Di Bergamo newspaper used to number two or three; now they regularly stretch to 10.

On Thursday, Stefano Fagiuoli, the head of the hospital’s department of medicine, turned to Facebook to ask people to donate to help the hospital on GoFundMe.

Amid the bad news, a 22-day-old baby admitted to the hospital who tested positive for the coronavirus has recovered and been allowed to go home, according to Il Messagero.