The strategy of the crown of Italy: a little more flexible despite the high figures

Italy currently suffers less from the corona virus than other EU countries, but the situation is not really relaxed. However, now there is a relaxation. Is the risk acceptable?

For more than a month, the doors of “Mamma Angelina” were only opened for delivery services. Now, the traditional restaurant in the north of Rome is open for guests again. Owner and chef Andrea Dell’Omo is relieved.

Getting out of this depression is good. A depression that was not only economic. Now we can return to receive our guests who are our friends. We hope to return to a situation that is at least half normal.

Jörg Seisselberg
ARD-Studio Rom

Average normal means: at least during the day until 6 pm, guests can sit at the tables in the bars and restaurants of the capital region of Lazio. Here and in ten other regions, the Health Ministry relaxed the crown’s rules at the beginning of the week. In addition to bars and restaurants, museums, for example, may also reopen.

As in other countries, especially restaurant owners in Italy had lobbied against the crown’s restrictions. Dell’Omo, which claims to have lost around 70 percent of its income in recent months, emphasizes:

We adhere to the guidelines in a civic spirit, in the interest of the common good. But when you saw that public transport was still full, the impression arose that we had to carry the brunt of the load.

Now restaurateurs hope to take a first step into everyday life.

Higher values ​​than in Germany

However, given the current number of infections in Italy, cautious opening does not seem without risks. In Lazio, for example, the levels of corona infection are significantly higher than in Germany. While according to the Robert Koch Institute the incidence of seven days per 100,000 inhabitants in Germany is around 90, the area around Rome currently has an incidence value of 135. In Lombardy it is 126, in Veneto it is even 143 That is so lot in Saxony-Anhalt, the state with currently the second highest value in Germany.

Italy is still loosening the rules in the aforementioned regions, based on its traffic light system that has been in place since autumn. Several dozen indicators are decisive in determining whether a region is classified as a yellow, orange or red zone. It is not only the incidence value that influences, but also the number of intensive care beds, deaths and the equipment of the health system. On the basis of this system, in the opinion of many quite opaque, the National Institute of Health calculates the division into individual zones on a weekly basis.

In addition to Lazio, Lombardy and Veneto, Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, Abruzzo, Calabria, Marche, Friuli and the Aosta Valley are now changing from orange to yellow.

“A slow descent, but a descent”

The director of the National Institute of Health ISS, Silvio Brusaferro, considers the relaxation decision justifiable, also with a view to international developments. Italy is currently in the lowest range of infections in Europe: “We have a downward trend, it is a slow decline, but a decline.”

In comparison, Italy is a little worse than Germany, but in fact better than, for example, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain or France.

In Italy, as in Germany, an incidence value of 50 is the goal of returning to a largely normal situation. Then the restrictions that currently also apply in the yellow zones were lowered: including an extended curfew between 10pm and 5am as well as a ban on leaving one’s region for no particular reason.

Objective: prevent another crash

The current traffic light system, which now allows the reopening of restaurants and museums in most of Italy, was introduced in the autumn by the now-ousted Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. After its harsh course in the first wave of infections in the spring, Conte had issued a line: A new national lockdown must be avoided because Italy would not survive it economically.

The current downward trend in infections in the country should be treated with caution, according to some experts. Also due to crown mutations, of which only a few have been found so far in Italy. Rome, with its current executive government, has yet to impose any entry ban.