Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 15:03 pm
Pope Francis has entrusted the Office of Papal Charities with 30 ventilators to be distributed to 30 hospitals in need during the coronavirus pandemic, the Vatican announced Thursday.
Because coronavirus is a respiratory illness, ventilators have become one of the top necessities in hospitals around the world, including in Italy's overwhelmed hospital system.
Which hospitals will receive the ventilators from the Vatican has not yet been determined.
Italy has been one of the hardest-hit countries in the coronavirus outbreak outside of China, with a death toll now surpassing 8,000, and with daily death counts totaling more than 600 or 700 in the past several days.
The country's northern region of Lombardy has been hit the hardest, in part because of its larger population of elderly people.