As a brutal second wave of the coronavirus pandemic tests the capacity of the Italian health care system, the government will seal off additional portions of the country on Wednesday, regional governors announced.
Unlike the first wave, which was concentrated in the country’s north, the virus is now raging across Italy, from the highly industrialized Milan area to the country’s more precarious south. In an effort to prevent a nationwide lockdown, the government is progressively sealing off and locking down hard-hit areas around the country by assessing their level of risk on a weekly basis.
Starting on Wednesday, movement will be strictly limited to and within the central regions of Abruzzo, Umbria and Tuscany, as well as Basilicata in the south and Liguria on the coast, local authorities announced. A significant portion of the country, including the Lombardy region, was put under lockdown by the government last week.
As of Nov. 9, the average number of new cases per day over seven days was 32,684, according to a New York Times database, a 92 percent increase from 14 days prior.
“Nearly all the Italian regions are highly affected,” said Giovanni Rezza, the director of the prevention department at the Health Ministry, adding that new restrictions were necessary in a situation that “keeps worsening.”
With more than half of its beds occupied by coronavirus patients, the San Luigi hospital near Turin, in the highly affected northern region of Piedmont, placed dozens of beds inside the hospital’s chapel and a conference room. Benches, the tabernacle and sacred icons were also moved out of the hospital chapel in Latina, near Rome, to make space for Covid-19 patients.
Pictures of nurses distributing oxygen tanks to patients queuing in their cars outside an emergency room in Naples as the hospital scrambled to find empty beds recalled images circulating in the early days of the outbreak, when Italy became the first European country to be hit hard by the coronavirus. Doctors’ warnings also felt familiar.
“If the influx of people and hospitalizations stays the same,” Antonio Voza, the emergency-room director at the Humanitas hospital in Milan, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, “we won’t be able to hold out for a week.”
Protests by regional presidents in the locked-down areas have unnerved the government.
“Do we get it or not that we are at war?” Pierpaolo Sileri, Italy’s deputy health minister, shouted on Italian television on Sunday. “We are fighting to save Italy.”
Last month, as the coronavirus made a resurgence, the government imposed a set of restrictions, including early closings for restaurants and bars, which health authorities said proved successful in flattening the virus’s reproduction rate.
But with more than 500 cases per 100,000 people, a nationwide lockdown seems increasingly likely, and some Italians are now wondering whether Italy learned any lessons from the devastating first wave.
Andrea Crisanti, a professor of microbiology at the University of Padua and a top scientific consultant on the virus in the Veneto region during the initial outbreak, said that the Italian government missed an opportunity to tame a second wave by failing to set up an efficient contact-tracing system and to sufficiently increase its testing capacity.
“We don’t have a plan to get out of this,” Mr. Crisanti said on Italian television. “We have hopes.”
— Emma Bubola The New York Times