Wrong path? Scientist questions Italy's coronavirus strategy
Italy's measures to halt coronavirus contagion do not seem to be working and it should change its strategy by setting up centres to separate people with suspected symptoms from their families, a prominent Italian scientist said on Monday.
Italy, which has suffered the world's highest death toll from coronavirus, has been in nationwide lockdown for about three weeks, but in the last four days, new infections have continued at between 4,000 and 6,000 a day.
Andrea Crisanti, professor of microbiology at Padua University, said in an interview with Radio Capital that many of these new cases are probably people who are being infected by fellow family members at home.
Crisanti said, instead of telling people with mild symptoms to self-isolate at home, authorities should have set up centres to separate them from their families, as was done in China where the epidemic originated in December.
Crisanti helped coordinate the coronavirus response in Italy's affluent northeastern region of Veneto, where blanket testing was introduced at the start of Italy's outbreak in the second half of February.
"Is someone posing the problem of why, despite all these restrictive measures, we are still seeing infections? Are they asking if all these people who are sick at home are infecting other members of their family?" he said.
"In our opinion, the infections are happening at home."
"We need to be much more aggressive in identifying people who are sick at home," he said.
"We need to go to their homes, test them, test their family members, their friends and neighbours, and all the people who test positive should be taken, if they are well enough, to accommodation centres outside their homes."
Angelo Borrelli, head of the Civil Protection Agency, said the ongoing rate of contagion and deaths did not mean the national government's measures were ineffective.
"Without these measures, we would be seeing far worse numbers and our health service would be in a far more dramatic state," Borrelli told reporters at the weekend.
If the above is true then the upper western hemisphere is in deep trouble
