As vaccinations lag, Italy's elderly again pay a price

BERGAMO, Italy (AP) — One year ago, Bergamo’s state-of-the-art Pope John XXIII Hospital verged on collapse as doctors struggled to treat 600 patients, with 100 of them in intensive care. Army trucks ferried the dead from the city’s overtaxed crematorium in images now seared into the collective pandemic memory.

The picture is much improved now: The hospital is treating fewer than 200 virus patients, just one quarter of whom require intensive care.

But still unchanged as Italy’s death rate pushes upward once again is that the victims remain predominantly elderly, with inoculation drives stumbling in the country and elsewhere in Europe.

“No, this thing, alas, I was not able to protect the elderly, to make clear how important it would be to protect the elderly,’’ said Dr. Luca Lorini, head of intensive care at the hospital named for the mid-20th century pope born in Bergamo. “If I have 10 elderly people over 80 and they get COVID, in their age group, eight out of 10 die.”

That was true in the first horrifying wave and remained “absolutely the same” in subsequent spikes, he said.

Promises to vaccinate all Italians over 80 all by the end of March have fallen woefully short, amid well-documented interruptions of vaccine supplies and organizational shortfalls. Just a third of Italy’s 7.3 million doses administered so far have gone to that age group, with more than half of those who carry memories of World War II still awaiting their first jab.

“We should have already finished with this,” Lorini told The Associated Press.

Italy's new premier, Mario Draghi, pledged during a visit to Bergamo on Thursday that the vaccine campaign would be accelerated. His remarks came as he inaugurated a park to honor Italy's over 104,000 dead. Through early March,...