Sixty-one doctors and other healthcare professionals have died of COVID-19 in Italy, which has been the country worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic so far, with 11,591 deaths as of March 30, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center.

A list of clinicians who have died during the COVID-19 epidemic has been compiled by the country’s National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists (FNOMCeO) and is being updated daily.

“Our doctors have been sent to war unarmed,” Filippo Anelli, president of the federation, told the Financial Times. He added: “The dead do not make a noise. Yet, the names of our dead friends, our colleagues, put here in black and white, make a deafening noise.”

Anelli also highlighted the lack of personal protective equipment in a March 25 statement: “It is reasonable to assume that these events would have been largely avoidable if health workers had been correctly informed and equipped with sufficient adequate personal protective equipment: masks, gloves, disposable gowns, protective visors, which instead continue to be in short supply.”

Nearly all of the doctors who have died were in northern Italy, where the epidemic began. Four were general practitioners (GPs) in Bergamo, the epicenter of the pandemic, in the Lombardy region, and another four GPs were in Lodi, a nearby town also in the Lombardy region.

Overall, 23 (38%) of the 61 doctors who have died were GPs, the family doctors who would be the first line of defense for anyone who is feeling unwell.

Then there are specialists, who presumably would have been seeing the more severely affected patients treated in hospitals. The list includes several pulmonologists, an anesthesiologist, an epidemiologist, and a medical examiner, as well as two doctors who were working in nursing homes.

Other healthcare professionals have also died from COVID-19. The list includes several dentists as well as an ophthalmologist.

Two of the dentists were 49 and 55 years old, notable because most of the other clinicians who died were in their 60s and 70s (and one was 90).

The FNOMCeO list does not specify whether these doctors were still working as physicians or whether they had retired. In Italy, the state pension starts at age 68, but doctors can choose when to retire, so many doctors are often still working at age 70 or older.

In addition, the majority of the deceased doctors are male, which reflects what has been reported for the overall COVID-19-related deaths in Italy (one analysis found that 70% of COVID-19 deaths were male, and mean age was 80).

Πηγή: medscape.com