They are two people 750 miles apart, separated by four countries as the crow flies, and born three decades apart. But for a moment, Dr Roberto Cosentini in Lombardy and Dr Shaan Sahota in London, speak almost as one person as they discuss the harrowing first wave of the coronavirus. “At the end of February, our city became one of the worst hit by the Covid pandemic in Italy,” says Dr Cosentini, 61, the head of the Emergency Department at the Papa Giovanni XVIII Hospital in Bergamo. “By the first two weeks of March, we had the worst-case scenario in the world.
It was like an apocalypse, like an iceberg spreading. At one time, ventilated patients reached almost 300. “It was like an earthquake where after the event you see many patients