Over 18 Priests Killed By Coronavirus In Italy After Comforting Sick Patients 

At least 18 priests have died of coronavirus in Italy, where clergymen are exposing themselves to the illness by comforting sick patients.

The Pope has encouraged Catholic priests to ‘have the courage to go out and go to the sick people’, but their visits to intensive care units have brought them into contact with some of the most serious virus cases.

At least 10 priests have died of Covid-19 in the diocese of Bergamo near Milan, according to Catholic newspaper Avvenire.

Another five deaths were registered in the city of Parma, while other cases have emerged in Brescia, Cremona and Milan, all in northern Italy.

The deaths, whether of priests or members of their communities, are ‘so numerous that it is difficult to count’, the Catholic newspaper wrote.

Like doctors, Italy’s priests come into contact with the disease’s most serious cases.

They are also known to congregate among themselves in close quarters, creating the perfect conditions for contagion.

The 10 deaths in Bergamo, five in Parma and three other reported cases mean the clerical death toll is at least 18.

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For comparison, a count by Italy’s ANSA news agency on Thursday put the number of medics killed by the disease at 13.

‘Dressed in a mask, a cap, gloves, a robe and protective glasses, we priests walk around the halls like zombies,’ Father Claudio del Monte told Italy’s Adnkronos news agency.

Del Monte has a parish in Bergamo, a walled, hillside city of 120,000 people which is now at the centre of the world’s worst outbreak.

With 4,634 infections as of Friday, the province had piled up 11 per cent of all of Italy’s cases.

Its population accounts for just 0.2 per cent of Italy’s total.

Bergamo has so many dead that army trucks had to deliver supplies of freshly-made wooden coffins yesterday.

Mortuaries can no longer hold all the bodies and there are fears that the true death toll may be even higher because some victims are never tested.

‘We no longer know where to put the dead,’ the bishop of Bergamo, Francesco Beschi, told the Vatican News site.

-Daily Mail