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South Tyrol hospitals are reaching their limits due to the corona pandemic. Mass testing should now slow the increase in the number of cases. On the first day, long strikes were formed in front of the test sites.
By Jörg Seisselberg, ARD Studio Rome
Georg Seebacher is one of the first in the morning. At the sports hall in his community Terlan, a suburb of Bolzano, he lines up to have cotton test rods inserted into his nose. He believes it is correct that South Tyrol has asked all citizens to get tested for the corona virus.
“I think it’s a sign that we have to stick together now,” says Seebacher. “If most can get tested, then we have a result and we can go back to normal everyday life. The economy will go back up and everyone will be able to go back to work normally.”
95 percent of hospital beds are occupied by corona patients
That is the hope that those responsible have sown in Bolzano. The hope of breaking the chain of infection with the “South Tyrol Testing” campaign and stopping the recent rapid rise in the number of Covid-19 infections. Patrizia Haller has registered as an assistant for the test stations at the Terlano sports center. “I am a nurse, I used to work in the Corona ward. Right now I am in the normal ward and I thought: this means that I can help here on the weekend for a few days to contain the pandemic as much as possible.”
Recently, the province of South Tyrol has increasingly entered a crisis over the Covid 19 pandemic. 95 percent of the autonomous province’s hospital beds are occupied by corona patients. Assistant Haller experienced this herself in her day job. “We are relatively at the limit in the hospital of the crown rooms and the population has to participate, otherwise it will be difficult.”
More than 100,000 tests on Friday
The impression of the first day: The campaign is accepted, which runs until Sunday. Not only in the Terlan sports center, but also in the neighboring state capital. “In Bolzano we were literally robbed in the early hours of the morning,” reports Deputy Mayor Luis Walcher. “That means we already had people queuing at seven o’clock and earlier. And when we opened some of the doors at eight fifteen, some had been in line for an hour and a half.”
By Friday night at 8 pm, 103,000 people had already participated, that is, almost a third of the total number of participants expected by the organizers. More than 1,500 people tested positive. You will need to be quarantined at home for ten days. Some participants criticized the fact that they had to wait a long time for the result of their tests, which is transmitted by email or SMS.
Objective: find those who have no idea
Those responsible in South Tyrol mostly rely on the fact that infected people who do not show symptoms of the disease discover that they are carriers of the corona virus through mass testing. Experts suspect that chains of infection are often triggered by people who do not even realize they are infected.
Precisely for this, says the organizer of the massive test, Patrick Franzoni, he was glad to have seen many families at the test stations. “Our message is yes: you have to get tested, that’s important, but the whole family has to do the test. Otherwise, there is still a risk that someone asymptomatic and with a viral load will not get tested and spread this can infection. “
Virologists in Italy have voiced criticism of the campaign in South Tyrol and speak of a “waste of money” because up to 30 percent of those infected remained undetected with the antigen test used. However, those responsible in Bolzano are betting that the massive test will change the trend, if at least a few thousand asymptomatically infected people discover that they have been infected.
