Master of Medicine News COVID in Ticino

As you may know, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit our canton extremely aggressively. For several weeks we fought against the virus with all our might to mitigate the effect of the pandemic; however, many patients have already died, many are currently in hospital and thousands of inhabitants are infected. The infection now seems to be over the expected peak, but it will take a long time before things will come back to normal. 

Enormous efforts have been made to redefine the hospital organization in order to provide adequate support and care for all COVID-19 patients. Within a few weeks two important institutions (District Hospital Locarno and Clinica Moncucco) have completely converted to COVID-19 Hospitals and many other hospitals have declared their willingness to receive COVID-19 patients. In addition, more than 100 intensive care beds have been created to cover the needs of patients requiring intubations. Not counting the doctors, nurses and students, including 5 students from ETH who have made themselves available to help the hospital facilities.

This wonderful achievement has been made possible thanks to a fantastic and intense collaboration and coordination between all the partners operating in our healthcare system. It is exactly the same approach which has made possible to build the Master programme in biomedicine at USI.

Even though we are facing a very difficult and challenging moment, we have never stopped working for the Master and we are very confident that everything will be ready to welcome you Monday morning, 14 September. We are actually even more motivated and determined than before, knowing that only by doing our best, today against COVID-19, and tomorrow for your medical career, we will keep alive our dream as students to become good doctors. We hope that the current situation is a further motivation for you as well to embrace the challenging career of a medical doctor.

We are looking forward to meeting you on 14 September. In the meantime, we will send you updates through this channel, but do not hesitate to write in case you have any questions.

We wish you all a Happy Easter and pelase stay safe!

Best regards

Boas EREZ, Rector

Mario BIANCHETTI, Dean

Professors Faculty of Biomedical Sciences