Video has emerged of a corpse sprawled across a hospital lavatory in a makeshift ward overflowing with coronavirus patients amid spiralling cases and deaths in Italy.
The unidentified man was a suspected coronavirus sufferer who had been waiting for a test in the packed, squalid A&E waiting room of Cardarelli Hospital in Naples.
The man filming, himself a Covid patient, says: ‘This man is dead, this is Cardarelli Hospital. Here we are, the emergency department.
‘This woman in her own piss and excrement, we don’t know if she’s dead or alive. The woman over there, we know nothing.’
Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, who comes from the region, said today: ‘The situation in Naples and in many areas of Campania is out of control … the central government needs to intervene because there is no time left.’
Further south, on the island of Sicily, the mayor of Palermo warned on Monday his region faced an ‘inevitable massacre’ as infections rose there.
‘The north has always had a well-equipped health system spread out across the territory. The situation there might not be optimal, but the south by comparison is a wasteland,’ Carlo Palermo, head of the ANAAO-ASSOMED doctors’ union, told Reuters.
Italy recorded another 636 deaths on Thursday and 37,978 new cases.
The total number of cases roared past the one million mark – with half of those infections emerging in just the last 19 days.
There have been a total of 43,589 deaths – the sixth highest in the world.