2024-01-03 18:06:00
Boom in flu and respiratory virus cases in Italy. “Like every year, but this year even more so due to the numbers reached by flu syndromes, in this period we are witnessing a health emergency which affects both the emergency rooms and not only. As family doctors these days we are overburdened with requests for information, phone calls, visits, certifications. There is an assault on our performance, like that of all healthcare professionals. Access to studies is greatly increasing. “But the first practical consequence for us is that the phone calls have doubled. If on average on ordinary days the calls to general practitioners, at a national level, are around 2 million, they have now become 4 million”. Alessandro Rossi, president of the Italian Society of General Medicine and Primary Care (SIMG), described the scenario to time.news Salute, going into detail about the impact that the ongoing respiratory virus epidemic in the country is having on local healthcare.
“Dividing this total of calls by family doctors, who are around 40 thousand in Italy, we understand how each of us spends hours with the receiver in our hand”, to answer at least a hundred phone calls daily, Rossi calculates. “We give advice, indications to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations, to carry out certifications. This load has increased and naturally the outpatient visits have also increased. It should be remembered that after the pandemic, fortunately, access is by appointment and even the dematerialized prescription has been a help , so the enormous crowds that we physically saw in pre-pandemic times are no longer seen.” Moments “also at risk of further spread” of flu epidemics. But “telephone and electronic contacts and even home visits have increased enormously in this period”.
The official numbers, highlights President Simg, “tell us that this is the strongest flu epidemic of the last 10 years and the incidence rate that it reached last week is very high: 17.2 cases per thousand assisted means over one million people who fell ill in the days “until Christmas Eve”. And there will probably be many more the following week, we will see the data shortly. We are talking about respiratory syndromes, some actually due to the influenza virus and others linked to other viruses, such as Covid itself which is still in circulation, the respiratory syncytial virus and other pathogens. Of course, the most fragile cases then end up in the emergency room, with clogging of the emergency-urgency areas.
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