The Italian doctors fighting death on the coronavirus front line
- The Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan is the first hospital to have been fully converted to deal with the coronavirus
- Specialists at the hospital have been on the frontline of Italy’s fight against the deadly disease
It was 7:40am on Friday, February 21 when Antonio Castelli, 56, head of the Resuscitation Unit at the Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, received a phone call from Giacomo Grasselli, the medical director of the Intensive Care unit at the Policlinico hospital in the same Lombardy capital city.
Castelli was at the wheel of his car, alongside him, his wife, who he first met when they were medical students and who now works at the same hospital as a heart surgeon. On their way back from Prague, they had planned to stop off for a couple of days in the Austrian Alps.
Grasselli asked: “Antonio, what do you think?”
“What can I say? It was a great vacation,” Castelli replied. “Prague is gorgeous.”
“No, Antonio, I mean the news.”
There was a moment's silence, the time it took Castelli’s wife to bring up the breaking news on her cellphone about the first cases in the region of Lodi, in northern Italy.
“It’s here now, too, Antonio,” Grasselli said. “We’re creating an emergency task force, you need to get back right now.”