Confronting COVID-19: Surging critical care capacity in Italy

Jose Manuel Rodriguez Llanes; Rafael Castro Delgado; Morten Gram Pedersen; Pedro Arcos Gonzalez; Matteo Meneghini

This crisis combines both characteristics (figure 1). Patients raise exponentially in numbers and a significant share of those patients will develop severe pneumonia (10), aggravated by concomitant disease and age (11, 12) . In addition, health workers are heavily exposed and they are overrepresented amongst the sick (13, 14) , which undermines the response capacity of the health system. The consolidated experience from China in responding to this crisis (5) and the lessons learnt from Italy in the early phase of the epidemic have the potential to provide important guidance to other nations. The two experiences provide a clear message that this epidemic can overwhelm health care capacities in a matter of days (5, 15, 16) . While the Italian government reacted quickly to early cases detected in Codogno by declaring the State of Emergency, followed by progressively restrictive measures (Box), the epidemic is not yet under control, with new cases ranging from 3 to 5 thousands per day in the last few days (17) .