Italian COVID-19 Patients Over 80 Years Old Will Be “Left to Die,” According to New Proposal

• The crisis management team in Turin made a proposal on how the Italian government should address the pandemic, once the virus gets out of control .
• The team proposed that healthcare sectors should determine who should receive treatment in intensive care and who will be denied.
• The protocol was made in case Italy’s intensive care capacity “runs short” as coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to infect thousands of people in Italy.

The civil protection department in Piedmont region, which serves as the crisis management team of Italy, created a proposal that victims who are aged 80 or beyond or in critical condition will be denied access to intensive care, once the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread in the hard-hit country.

In the unfortunate set up, patients ages 80 and above will be denied access to health care, which in effect, means they will be left to die. The said proposal was obtained by Telegraph and it has protocols on how the medical practitioners will determine which patients should be treated in the intensive care and who will be denied, amidst shortage of hospital beds and overcrowded emergency space due to continuous spread of the fatal illness.

“Who lives and who dies is decided by age and by the patient’s health conditions. This is how it is in a war,” the document reads.

The criteria for access to intensive care, the document reads, will be in case an overwhelmingly large number of people contracts the disease.

The document explained that due to the epidemic, there will be an imbalance between the clinical needs of infected patients and the availability of intensive care resources. Additionally, they mentioned that the Italian government will probably have no choice but to implement the protocol.

“Should it become impossible to provide all patients with intensive care services, it will be necessary to apply criteria for access to intensive treatment, which depends on the limited resources available,”said the document.

They clarified, however,that the protocol will only be imposed if the “situation becomes such an exceptional nature” when there is already limited resources to admit everyone, forcing hospitals to focus more on those cases who have chances of recovering or what they call “potential survival.”

The crisis management document has already been finalized and they’re only waiting for the approval from a technical-scientific committee before they officially send it to all hospitals across Italy.

As of this writing, Italy already has 53,578 confirmed cases of coronavirus with 4,825 deaths, surpassing China’s 3,261 death toll.