Fears of new wave of infections in the south of Italy
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There is fear in Italy fear that the virus is silently spreading in the country’s south.
As the dead in Italy keep piling up, virologists warn that the actual number of cases could be up to more than five times as high as the official count, which reached just shy of 86,500 on Friday. That means infections will still climb even with Italians ordered to stay home for all but essential activity.
Italy, one of the hot spots in the global pandemic, has by far the most virus deaths of any nation in the world, a grim tally that reached 9,134 as of Friday. Italy also surpassed China in its number of confirmed cases and has more than any nation besides the United States, which outpaced China in total cases on Thursday.
In the south, where hospitals are even less prepared and equipped than the prosperous north, there is a great lack of medical equipment, protective masks and personnel. In one week, Puglia in the “heel” of the Italian peninsula went from 478 cases to 1,182, with a doubling of ICU patients. Campania also doubled its caseload to 1,310 and tripled the number of people in ICUs.
“It’s a matter of hours, not days,” the governor of the Campania region that includes Naples wrote to the central government, complaining that his urgent requests for ventilators had gone unheeded. “There is a real chance of adding a tragedy of the south to the tragedy of the north.”
Cateno De Luca, mayor of the Sicilian city of Messina, took the extraordinary step of recording a warning to residents in his nasal, gravelly voice for drones to play as they fly over the seaside city monitoring residents’ movements.
“Don’t go outside! That is an order from Mayor De Luca!” the drone blasts.
