The amateur video, which has gone viral since it was posted on Wednesday, was captured in the packed and chaotic emergency room of the Cardarelli Hospital, where the man – suspected of having coronavirus – was reportedly waiting for a test.
The hospital described the posting of the video on social media as “deplorable”.
The man who posted the video claims he did so to highlight the plight of patients in the city’s emergency rooms.
“I shot the video and put it on Facebook and other platforms to show that we are treated like people with the plague and that elderly people are abandoned and left on their own, which is what happened to that old man who died in the bathroom, and who was alive when I arrived at the emergency room,” Rosario La Monico told Italian news agency ANSA.
“He was in the same room as me; he didn’t come out of the bathroom for a while and so I went in.
“He couldn’t breathe so I splashed some water on his face and then I asked for help but no one paid any attention to me.
“[Health workers] arrived half an hour later but he was already dead.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Luigi Di Maio, who described the footage as “shocking”, said that the central government “must intervene immediately...above all in the south, which risks imploding”.
Di Maio called for the army to be sent in to help hard-pressed hospitals in Campania, where he is from, cope with the health crisis.
“The health system is in huge difficulties in the whole of the south: the army and the civil protection agency must go in to reinforce our doctors and nurses who are on their last legs,” he declared.
The scenes in the video highlight the divide in the health systems between Italy’s wealthy, well-equipped north and the poorer regions in the south.
The first wave of Italy’s coronavirus pandemic was concentrated largely in the north, while the south escaped relatively unscathed.
However, now southern regions have been hammered by the country’s second wave of infections and are struggling to cope with the health emergency, with local doctors saying the situation in Naples’ hospitals is “on the verge of collapse”, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
The sick in Naples have been administered oxygen and placed on drips through their car windows as they wait for hours for COVID-19 tests or to be admitted to hospital.
Further south, on the island of Sicily, the mayor of Palermo warned on Monday his region faced an “inevitable massacre” as infections rose there.
The number of coronavirus cases in Italy roared past the one million mark this week – with half of those infections emerging in just the last 19 days.
The number of deaths totals 43,589 – the sixth highest tally in the world.
