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In recent days, several newspapers have dealt with an alleged plan drawn up from the first days of the coronavirus emergency by the Technical-Scientific Committee (CTS) of Civil Protection to combat the pandemic, and it was never applied. Today, Tuesday, September 8, Corriere della Sera has posted large excerpts of this plan and the cover image. According to Messenger Service The document was about forty pages long and contained three scenarios that simulated the trend of the epidemic in Italy, from worst to best, and a series of measures to be implemented if necessary, including finding masks and other protection devices. individual, and the increase in places in intensive care units in hospitals.
The plan, of which Republic and the Corriere della Sera had already written at the end of April, it has now become a subject of political debate: the opposition accused the government of having had a “secret plan” of which it kept public opinion in the dark, and which it never implemented because it underestimated the impact of the epidemic; the government and Civil Protection defended themselves by explaining that in reality there has never been any secret plan that has not been carried out, and that this is a great misunderstanding.
Obviously the problem is not so much that the government had a “secret” plan – it is normal for emergency scenarios and measures to be proposed between January and February – but rather that the explanations given for now have not been sufficient. The government’s public position regarding the alleged plan has changed several times over time: neither the Ministry of Health nor the Civil Protection have fully explained their reasons, limited to a few interviews and incomplete reconstructions.
The story, from the beginning
The minutes of the CTS, recently available on the Civil Protection website, mainly contains the agendas of the meetings of the 26 experts that are part of it, appointed on February 5 by the government, and their communications with officials and technicians governmental.
The existence of a plan is mentioned for the first time in the minutes of the meeting held on February 24, a few days after the discovery of the first cases of coronavirus in Lombardy and Veneto. The report speaks of a “plan to organize Italy’s response in the event of an epidemic” and specifies that it “must be completed”, with particular attention to the “resuscitation facility”, that is, the hospital wards that should have managed the cases. more serious. The report ends with the “consent” among the CTS members that the plan not be released to the newspapers.
The plan reappears after about ten days: in the minutes of the March 2 meeting, the CTS “agrees to adopt it in the final version”, and the need for the document to remain “secret” is underlined. In all likelihood, the CTS intended to invite its members and anyone who reads the minutes to confidentiality, since under Italian law the only body that can impose state secrets is the Prime Minister’s Office.
The CTS will talk about the plan again at the next meeting, on March 4, adding some details: in the minutes we read that the plan was prepared by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), the main research and technical consulting center. public health scientist in Italy, along with the Ministry of Health and the Spallanzani hospital in Rome, which at that time was the most involved in the early stages of coronavirus management. The CTS invites the ISS to update the plan “taking into account the evolution of the epidemiological dynamics in the country”, that is, the identification of hundreds of cases that occurred in the first days of March.
In the following days and weeks, however, the plan disappears from the CTS minutes, except for a sporadic mention on March 9, and resurfaces only in the minutes of the April 27 meeting, a few days later. Republic and the Corriere della Sera reported the existence of a plan that was never implemented whose objective, as published by the Corriere della Sera, was to identify “a series of possible actions to activate in relation to the development of epidemic scenarios, in order to contain their effects”. In short, a series of emergency measures to contain the spread of the virus as much as possible in the first and crucial days of the epidemic.
On April 22, a director of the Ministry of Health, Andrea Urbani, director general of health planning, told al Corriere della Sera that the plan exists, has been applied and was “classified” because “the line was not to scare the population and work to contain the contagion.”
Just two days later, Goffredo Zaccardi, the chief of staff of Health Minister Roberto Speranza, writes to the CTS to ask if the plan that the newspapers have just drafted has ever been recorded in the minutes (the communications have been declassified along with the minutes). . Angelo Miozzo, coordinator of the Committee, responds to Zaccardi that in reality the plan “is more correctly configured as a study that hypothesizes possible different scenarios for the spread of the epidemic” and “is not attached to the minutes but has been examined and is in the minutes of the Committee “. scientific technician “.
The communication between Zaccardi and Miozzo remains confidential: the alleged plan is no longer publicly discussed until the end of August, when after a request for access to the documents Republic obtains and publishes what the CTS says is the only document attributable to the plan: a study presented at CTS on February 12 by Stefano Merler, a mathematician who works for the Bruno Kessler Foundation.
The study is titled 2019-NCOV spread scenarios in Italy and impact on the health service, in case the virus cannot be contained locally and among other things, second Republic, assumed two contagion scenarios based on the trend of the R index0, which indicates the number of people infected on average by a person with an infectious disease. He writes Republic:
The two scenarios considered plausible by the study are R.0 1.3 and 1.7. These are the results. In the first scenario, the contagion cases in Italy would have been around one million, in the second, even two. Of these, severe cases requiring treatment range from 200 to 400 thousand. The total need for ICU beds varies between 60 and 120,000. […] The document does not make estimates on the number of deaths, but according to Merler, the fatality rate registered at that time in China applied to the Italian scenarios produced a terrifying result: between 35 and 60 thousand deaths from Covid-19. [Al momento i casi individuati in Italia sono 277mila, mentre i morti circa 35mila, ndr]
After the new revelation of Republic, the CTS denies that there ever was a real plan, and the Ministry of Health is in the same position. In an interview published on September 5, Miozzo tells a Republic that the alleged plan coincided with Merler’s study, that the measures were not decided in advance but “day by day”, and that the misunderstanding was caused by the interviews with Urbani, who “used that adjective, secret.” Miozzo adds that after the declassification of the CTS minutes “now everything is public.” Roberto Speranza also, during the party organized by Daily occurrence, He gave a similar explanation: The alleged plan coincided with Merler’s study, which was kept confidential “so as not to sow alarm.”
Monday September 7 Republic He specified that Merler’s study was not so secret, but simply tried not to leak through the newspapers: the Ministry of Health presented it by Alberto Zoli, the member of the CTS who had been appointed by the committee of the regions, who by therefore theoretically they knew the document. In an interview with the newspaper the following day, Merler himself stated that “an anti-pandemic plan is needed. It is difficult, perhaps even pointless, to make a real one now. But after this epidemic we have to invest time and resources to do it. We pay a high price for not updating it for twelve years. “
What happens?
In this story there are some aspects that after months are still unclear. First, the exact coherence of the plan: at first the CTS spoke of it as a series of measures developed by the ISS, the Ministry of Health and Spallanzani, after almost two months it had become a study of possible scenarios that It contained concrete proposals, while the latest version is that the plan coincides with the study presented on February 12 by Stefano Merler. The plan may have changed shape in the course of the epidemic, but neither the ministry nor the CTS have so far said openly.
It is not clear, in fact, why the government no longer admits, after having done so at the end of April, the existence of a first plan that contained specific measures and indications: Riccardo Luna wrote in Republic that the first versions contained “data on beds, intensive care, resuscitation; actions to take in case of a first infection. There is also talk of the need for masks and health protection devices for doctors and nurses. Merler’s study does not contain such data.
Finally, we do not even know why the government and the CTS insist that nothing is secret anymore: for now neither the Merler study nor the versions of the plan cited in the February and March minutes of the CTS are public.
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