An Italian nurse killed herself after testing positive for coronavirus and fearing she had infected others, a nursing federation has revealed.
Daniela Trezzi, 34, was working on the front line of the coronavirus crisis at a hospital in Lombardy, the worst-affected region of Italy. The National Federation of Nurses of Italy confirmed her death and expressed its ‘pain and dismay’ in a statement last night.
The federation said many medical workers were suffering ‘heavy stress’ because they feared they were spreading the virus while trying to bring the crisis under control. The nursing group also revealed that ‘a similar episode had happened a week ago in Venice, with the same underlying reasons’.
The general manager of San Gerardo hospital, Mario Alparone, said Daniela had been at home sick since March 10, and that ‘she was not under surveillance’. It came as Italy’s death toll surged again yesterday with 743 new fatalities recorded in one day, dampening hopes that the tide was starting to turn.
However, the number of total infections rose by just eight per cent – the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21. ‘The measures we took two weeks ago are starting to have an effect,’ civil protection service chief Angelo Borrelli told the daily La Repubblica before the new figures came out.
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A day earlier, new cases in a 24-hour period had totalled just 280. For two days running, the percentage of day-to-day increase in caseload stands at 8 per cent. Health authorities have cautioned that it’s too soon to say if Italy is about to see a peak in the outbreak.
Health officials across the ravaged Mediterranean country are poring over every new piece of data to see whether two weeks of bans and closures have made a dent in the crisis. The harshest restrictions are theoretically due to expire on Wednesday evening – although the government is all but certain to extend them in some form for weeks or even months.
Italy’s 743 new deaths broke two days of successive declines that had taken the number down to 601 on Monday. It set a world record of 793 fatalities on Saturday. But the rate of officially registered new infections was just eight percent – the same as Monday and the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21. It had been as high as 50 per cent at the start of March.
Daily Mail