ROME – Dr. Carlo Mosca’s online patient reviews describe a loving “humanitarian” who saved countless lives before the coronavirus pandemic hit Italy. Patients and their families praised the loving father, whose hospital in Brescia, northern Italy, was one of the hardest hit during the first wave of the pandemic last March.
Something clearly changed in Moscow as the pandemic raged. This week, the 47-year-old was arrested on a double homicide charge, accused of killing weak COVID patients and having investigated his medical history to release beds for other patients. Moscow describes the allegations as “unfounded” claiming that the overwhelmed health care system is the reason patients died.
During the first months of the pandemic, Italian doctors faced horrific decisions when deciding who to give respirators and other supplies to, often deciding who lives or dies based on their chances of survival, essentially leaving them to die. weak due to lack of treatment. But what is being accused in Moscow is to go one step further and kill the patients himself.
Two patients who died under the care of Moscow, Natale Bassi, 61, and Angelo Paletti, 80, were exhumed last month as prosecutors built the case against the primary care physician via text messages. among nurses who saw the loving doctor transform Dr. Jekyll becomes a sinister Mr. Hyde, though he is likely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the human tragedy surrounding him.
The investigating magistrate in the case has suggested that Moscow was the “victim of the extreme stress caused by having to deal with the growing influx of COVID cases,” according to court documents. “The replication of the extreme conditions that led to his crimes made it likely that he would resolve to administer banned drugs to the most severe patients in order to expedite their death, thus falsifying the data included in the relative medical records.” By simply withholding treatment, patients could persist for weeks or months. By injecting them, the prosecutor wrote, he could release the much-needed beds more quickly.
Authorities are now reviewing the records of all dead patients in Moscow to look for abnormalities in treatment and deaths. They do not rule out exhuming other bodies, although most of the people who died during the first wave of the pandemic were cremated.
As the Moscow hospital overflowed and more than 600 patients with COVID were under his care suddenly, nurses say he began directing them to inject lethal doses of Succinylcholine and Propofol, which are used often in intubating patients, in patients with COVID who should never be intubated. . The use of drugs in non-intubated patients causes them to drown, according to court documents. During the months of March and April, before a nurse confronted Moscow threatening to inform him, orders for both drugs grew by 70 percent, according to court documents seen by The Daily Beast.
As things got more frantic, nurses began to exchange worrying messages that now make up the prosecution’s case, and at least one confronted their mood. “Did he ask you to administer the drugs without intubating them?” wrote a nurse. “I am not killing patients just because I want to free the beds. That’s crazy, ”wrote another.
When the nurses began rejecting Moscow’s orders, she allegedly began injecting patients in person, asking them to leave him alone with the patients. Prosecutors say he also wrote false terminal diagnoses on patients’ letters, giving them a more credible cause of death.
Mosca, who has been overcrowded from his hospital, is under house arrest until his trial begins this spring.