'Abandoned' Italian hospital fears virus' march south

At the Locri hospital in southern Italy, patients are often sent elsewhere for lack of doctors, the lifts are endlessly in disrepair and the CT scan works one day, but not the next.

Infiltration by the mafia, severe doctor shortages, and a regional health agency hundreds of millions of euros in debt are just a few of the challenges the hospital confronted in 2019 alone.

And that was before coronavirus.

Now, residents of the community in Italy's southernmost region of Calabria are bracing for what they fear could be an inexorable march south of the disease that has killed over 17,000 people in the country, and wondering how they can possibly cope.

"It's adding a crisis on top of a crisis," Locri's mayor Giovanni Calabrese told AFP.

The fact that Locri has so far been spared any deaths, he said, was "the only good news we've got".

To date, Italy's devastating coronavirus crisis has been centred in its prosperous, industrial north.

In regions such as Lombardy and Piedmont some hospitals rival the best in Europe, but unrelenting waves of patients, combined with too few doctors, ventilators and supplies, have brought them to breaking point.

Health authorities have warned for weeks that if a similar surge in cases erupts in the south, the consequences could be even more devastating.

"If all these patients start coming in like what's going on in Lombardy, how would we do it?" asked Emanuela Barbuto, regional leader of the Fsi-Usae union which represents public health workers, among others. She said residents felt "abandoned".

"The system can't hold up."