Milan Taps Berlusconi, Moncler in Bid to Add Intensive Care Beds

(Bloomberg) --

The Italian region at the center of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak is tapping financial help from former Premier Silvio Berlusconi and fashion company Moncler SpA to build emergency care facilities.

As Italy’s death toll surpasses China’s, the Lombardy region is pushing to erect an ad-hoc hospital in its capital, Milan, in just 10 days. The project is modeled on the Chinese city of Wuhan’s crash building program this winter after the pandemic erupted there.

“The new hospital is just Lombardy’s latest, most emphatic response to the coronavirus pandemic,” Giulio Gallera, the region’s top health official, said in a phone interview. “We’ve almost doubled intensive care beds in a matter of weeks and repurposed 150 hospitals across the region since the outbreak.”

The move comes as military trucks transport coffins out of the stricken city of Bergamo, near Milan, and hospitals across the area struggle to keep up with the flood of virus patients, many gravely ill or dying.

The number of people in intensive care units, or ICUs, which rely on lung ventilators to keep people breathing, has more than doubled in Lombardy over the past 10 days to more than 1,000. Fatalities in the region have risen to 2,168, 60% of the Italian total.

Soldiers on Streets

As it seeks approval from Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s government to put soldiers on the street to enforce a near-total lockdown, the administration in Lombardy has raised more than 40 million euros ($43 million) from donors ranging from Berlusconi to Moncler, a Milan-based maker of trendy down parkas, for the hospital project.

Works have already begun on the new facility in Milan’s Portello zone, home to the city’s downtown exhibition center and just a few miles from the central Duomo cathedral. The hospital will initially have 200-250 beds, at a total cost of some 10 million euros, according to regional officials.

“It’s a fight against time, we’re committed to building in 10 days,” Fondazione Fiera Milano Chairman Enrico Pazzali said in a phone interview. Given that timeline, “the most crucial resource will be doctors,” he said, as the facility will need about 1,200 medical personnel to operate.

The new Milan facility is just one of the many medical building projects being fast-tracked across the region, which accounts for about 20 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product. Bergamo, a city 50 kilometers from Milan that’s the epicenter of the crisis, is building a temporary field hospital. Cremona to the south, one of the first Lombard towns to suffer a virus outbreak, has added 60 new beds.

New Ward

Milan’s San Raffaele Hospital is also opening a new intensive care facility. Donations from a crowd-funding project promoted by fashion influencer Chiara Ferragni brought in over 4 million euros for the new ward, which is nearly ready, according to a tweet from the hospital on Wednesday.

A range of companies and wealthy families across the north, including the billionaire Agnellis, founders of Fiat, have also made donations worth millions of euros, with much of the money earmarked for ventilators.

Gas network operator Snam SpA has purchased 500 ventilators that are due to be shipped from next week, while both Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Ferrari NV may soon shift some car making to medical equipment manufacturing. Drugmaker Recordati SpA is donating cash and medicine.

Still, a new study by the European Society of Anaesthesiology showed that the rate of increase in the number of ICU patients may have already peaked in Lombardy -- with further increases ahead for the rest of the country.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.