This is a translated version of the statement “la strage degli innocent” signed by several Italian organisations
The most fragile people are denied access to care.
This time the innocent are not children, but older people with disabilities. They die anyway, hundreds of them. Many at home, many more in the regional residential institutions.
I am talking about persons with disabilities and underlying conditions, especially older people – but not only – who in recent weeks have been denied any form of protection against Covid-19 and who are now paying this neglect with their lives.
Once they have contracted the disease, they are denied access to emergency healthcare and treatment in hospitals, leaving them to die in their beds. They die in their homes or residential institutions, without all the care and treatments that people in hospitals receive. This way, what is already provided for in the “guidelines” of Italian anesthetists is implemented in a silent manner: due to the lack of beds in intensive care, priority is given to young people with no underlying conditions to the detriment of older people with previous pathologies.
Their carers, whether they are relatives or social workers, still lack the necessary masks and protective equipment to avoid infection and being infected. Authorities have so far privileged health care facilities over support services and facilities in the distribution of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment),
These are people who die in silence. Often they are not even included in the count of “deaths for Covid-19” because they have been denied the right to be tested, as some Mayors are already denouncing. People about whom it is said “they would have died anyway”. However we know – and the statistics confirm – that if properly treated they could have lived for one, two, ten, twenty years.
There is nothing natural in this cruel choice to sacrifice the most fragile people. We are sacrificing their lives and we are sacrificing our dignity, the dignity of each of us.
For many of them we are still in time to change course. Let’s do it!
We need to immediately provide protective equipment and access to the testing, doctors and medicines needed to ensure timely diagnosis and treatment. We need persons with disabilities of any age to have access, at least on equal terms with the rest of the population, to intensive treatment when useful and necessary.
We cannot deny anyone the hope and the possibility of being healed and live.
Signatories
Forum Terzo Settore Lombardia
LEDHA
Uneba Lombardia
Alleanza Cooperative Italiane-Welfare Lombardia
Acli Lombardia
Aism Lombardia
Ancescao Lombardia
Anffas Lombardia
Anteas Lombardia
Arci Lombardia
Arlea
Associazione Banco Alimentare Lombardia
Auser Lombardia
Cnca Lombardia
Ceal
Federazione Regionale Lombarda Società San Vincenzo de’ Paoli
Movimento Apostolico Ciechi Milano
Movimento Apostolico Ciechi Varese
Uildm Comitato Lombardo