I f the fight against coronavirus is a war, Gina Portella of all people knows what one looks like. After 15 years between Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone – a country ravaged by an outbreak of Ebola – the anaesthesiologist-intensive care specialist is about to enter a new battlefield, this time on home turf.

Italy is where the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak has hit the hardest. On Sunday, the death toll stood at 15,362 – more than in China and the US combined – but the real number may be four times higher. In Bergamo, a province of about a million people in the region of Lombardy, the sheer number of patients succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital.