Most emergency rooms in Sardinia are facing an emergency situation, with flu-related admissions—the island is among the hardest-hit regions in Italy—compounding a chronic bed shortage, with many patients on stretchers awaiting admission.
«I don't know if we're already at the peak but the cases are sharply increasing», explained Paolo Pinna Parpaglia , director of the complex structure of the Emergency Room Obi and Emergency Medicine of the Aou of Sassari .
At the Santissima Annunziata Hospital's emergency room, around thirty patients arrive with flu symptoms every day : "They mostly present respiratory complications and are mostly elderly and frail , requiring hospitalization in mainly medical wards, which are also crowded for other conditions," adds Pinna Parpaglia, who believes the arrival of the flu "represents a problem not only for the emergency room, but for the entire hospital." The recommendation is—in addition to getting vaccinated— to avoid going to the emergency room whenever possible if you have flu symptoms, which can be treated at home under the supervision of your family doctor. Going to the hospital only if you develop more severe respiratory symptoms, a sign of lung involvement or other secondary infections.
At the Emergency Room of the TO In Cagliari, however, there are about thirty patients waiting for hospitalization, five of them for influenza. "An intolerable general situation ," warns the director. Wolfgang Mumps - also because after Covid, patients affected by the flu virus should be isolated. Moreover, the presence of patients awaiting hospitalization makes care difficult, increasing the risk of complications and mortality.
