Joy, hope as staff at Italy’s COVID epicentre gets first jabs

Less than a year ago, doctors in northern Italy were so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients that they were carrying out triage in hastily erected tents.

The hospital at Cremona was at the heart of the unfolding tragedy.

On Dec. 27, its nurses carried out the first vaccinations against the disease that has claimed some 72,000 lives in Italy, nearly 25,000 of them in the northern Lombardy region.

The arrival of the vaccine has sent hopes soaring in Cremona among healthcare workers at the frontline of the tragedy back in late February.

"Today is a big moment when you think back to all that we have been through... especially during the first wave of the pandemic," said Isabella Palazzini, a nurse who was among the first to get the jab on Dec. 27.

"They were very difficult times, both for the patients and for us, the care givers," said Palazzini, three of whose colleagues died of COVID.

Fifty of Italy's first lot of 9,750 doses arrived in Cremona, an hour's drive from Milan, aboard an ambulance escorted by two police vehicles.

The delivery of the precious cargo took place with great fanfare, with the mask-wearing mayor and local administration chief in attendance.

The uniformed police and hospital workers broke out in spontaneous applause.

Armed police then accompanied the vaccines packed in a grey container similar to a picnic cooler and loaded it onto a trolley to be transferred into waiting refrigerators where they will be kept under lock and key.

"It is a moment of great happiness," said Monia Betti, head of the hospital's pneumology department.

"It is the hope of a change that has finally materialised after 10 months in which we have assisted very seriously-ill patients."

Before...