Italian Rugby Star becomes Ambulance Driver

Italian international Maxime Mbanda has leapt from the back row on the rugby pitch to the front line in the fight against the coronavirus, becoming a volunteer ambulance driver in Parma, and bears witness to a frightening reality on the pandemic.

AFP reported that Last Saturday, Italian star Mbanda scheduled to face England in front of 60 000 people in Rome for his 21st Italian cap, but that match, like so many others, postponed.

Instead, wearing a mask and protective suit, he went out again as an ambulance driver with other volunteers from the Yellow Cross in Parma, in Emilia-Romagna, one of the areas most affected by the coronavirus.

By Saturday, almost 800 more people in Italy had died from the disease, taking the total in the country to 4 825.

“When everything cancelled in rugby, I wondered how I could help, even without medical expertise,” Mbanda, who plays for Zebre Rugby, the Parma club.

“I found the Yellow Cross, which had a transport service for medicine and food for the elderly.”

After one day delivering masks, food and prescriptions, the physical strength of the 26-year-old forward put to good use where it was most needed, “on the front line, at the heart of the problem”.

“I found myself transferring positive patients from one local hospital to another.

He added “I help with the stretcher or if there patients to carried from a wheelchair.

“I also hold the oxygen,” he explains.

It is a situation of desperate urgency, where, he says, “95 percent of hospital facilities dedicated to coronavirus patients”.

“If people saw what I see in the hospitals, there wouldn’t be a queue in front of the supermarkets anymore,” he said.

“They would think two, three or four times before leaving home, even to go running.”