Italian region stricken by last year’s Covid outbreak faces surging cases

Nurses work in the Covid-19 ward at the Mellino Mellini hospital in Chiari, northern Italy (Luca Bruno/AP)

The 160-bed hospital in the Po River Valley town of Chiari has no more room for patients stricken with the highly contagious variant of Covid-19 first identified in Britain that has put hospitals in Italy’s northern Brescia province on high alert.

That history was repeating itself one year after Lombardy became the epicentre of Italy’s pandemic was a sickening realisation for Dr Gabriele Zanolini, who runs the Covid ward in the M. Mellini Hospital in the once-walled city that maintains its medieval circular street pattern.