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Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has paid tribute to the more than 103,000 people who have died from Covid-19 in the country, a number that continues to rise by hundreds every day.
Draghi traveled to Bergamo, the northern province that became known as “the Wuhan of Italy,” as it became Europe’s first major virus outbreak a year ago, during a national day of mourning for the dead.
“We cannot hug each other, but this is the day when we should all feel even closer,” he said at the inauguration of a memorial park near the main hospital in the city of Bergamo.
“This place is a symbol of the pain of an entire nation,” he said, before witnessing the planting of one of the 850 trees planned for the park to the sound of the sadness of a trumpet.
Earlier, Draghi laid a wreath at the Bergamo cemetery and observed a minute’s silence, as the country’s flags flew at half mast from all public buildings.
Italy chose March 18 for its annual coronavirus commemoration day to coincide with the day in 2020 when the military had to intervene to remove dozens of coffins from the overwhelmed Bergamo crematorium.
The haunting images of camouflaged trucks laden with coffins cruising through the city at night quickly became one of the symbols of the pandemic in Italy and beyond.
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The prime minister also vowed not to back down in an ongoing campaign to expand national vaccination efforts, despite the ongoing controversy over the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) was due to clarify whether the vaccine is safe after unproven allegations of links to blood clots led to its suspension across much of Europe this week.
“Whatever your decision, the vaccination campaign will continue with the same intensity, with the same objectives,” said Draghi, expressing his confidence in increased vaccine supplies.
The Italian government has set a goal of tripling vaccinations to 500,000 per day by mid-April and fully vaccinating 80% of the population by mid-September.
At the same time, he relocked much of the country on Monday to contain a third wave of the virus that has put hospitals under new stress and claimed 431 lives today alone.
At the Seriate hospital, east of the city, the intensive care unit is back at full capacity, with its eight beds occupied by coronavirus patients, although the figures are lower than last year.
“Covid is more aggressive now, with many cases of the new variant in English,” said Roberto Keim, director of the unit.
There are many here who criticize the authorities for acting too slowly to acknowledge the scale of the crisis last year and not to impose swift restrictions to stop the spread of the virus, including a ban on gatherings.
“At the beginning of March [2020]We saw people going to funerals for Covid victims and they themselves died a few weeks later, “said Roberta Caprini of Generli Funeral Home.
The 38-year-old was left in charge of managing an unprecedented lawsuit from the family business after her father and uncle contracted the coronavirus. They later recovered.
“Normally we organize around 1,400 burials a year. But in March 2020, we did 1,000,” he said.
Germany Reports Largest Increase in Covid-19 Cases in Two Months
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany rose by 17,504 to 2,612,268, the largest daily increase since January 22, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed today.
The reported death toll rose by 227 to 74,132, while the number of new cases per 100,000 people over seven days rose to 90, compared with 86 a day earlier.
Germany is in a third wave of the pandemic, fueled by a loosening of restrictions in recent weeks, just as a more transmissible variant has spread, the RKI said, predicting a big jump in cases in the coming weeks.
That has not been helped by a slow launch of vaccines, most affected by this week’s decision to suspend the use of AstraZeneca doses due to safety concerns.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and state leaders agreed to a phase-down of restrictions earlier this month along with an “emergency brake” to allow authorities to reimpose restrictions if the number of cases exceeds 100 per 100,000 in three consecutive days.
They are scheduled to meet on March 22.
Some experts are calling on the government to move away from focusing on incidence rates, noting that as more tests are done, there will be more positive results, even as the number of infected older people drops due to vaccines.
“This figure is very problematic,” Juergen Windeler, director of the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWIG), told the Neue Berliner Redaktionsgesellschaft newspapers.
Talks between Ms Merkel and the leaders of the 16 federal states about the vaccination campaign, in particular the use of family doctors to administer Covid-19 vaccines, will take place tomorrow.
Merkel has said that all Germans will have been offered a vaccine by September 21, five days before the federal elections.
Azerbaijan detects several cases of B117 coronavirus variant
Azerbaijan has detected its first cases of a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus first identified in the UK, authorities said today.
The variant was detected in three samples, according to the National Center for Hematology and Transfusiology, which said that the vaccine currently used in Azerbaijan is effective against new variants.
Azerbaijan, a country of about 10 million people in the South Caucasus, began vaccinating citizens against Covid-19 with the vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd in January.
The country has registered a total of 242,491 coronavirus cases and 3,307 deaths.
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