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Among the four regions that the government has included in the red areas, Calabria presents a different, and somewhat paradoxical situation, linked to the history of the regional health commissioner, infrastructure deficiencies and delays in the spending of government funds. This situation has been complicated in recent days due to the resignation of Saverio Cotticelli, Health Commissioner in Calabria since January 2019, after he said in a television interview that he did not know that he had to be the one to do the “Covid plan” for the region.
On November 4, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced some new restrictive measures to contain the so-called “second wave” of coronavirus in the country. Since Friday, November 6, Italy has been divided into three areas, according to the severity of the local epidemiological situation: a red, an orange and a yellow, from the most serious to the least serious. In the red zone, the one in which the transmissibility of the virus is widespread and more serious and requires more drastic restrictive measures, are Calabria, Lombardy, Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta. But compared to the other regions, Calabria has particular characteristics.
The three groups with moderate, medium-high and high criticality were identified on the basis of the Rt index and 21 parameters, including the number of hospital admissions and the percentage of positive swabs in all swabs performed. However, by placing a region in one band rather than another, the entire stability of regional health services is also taken into account. This is what happened in Calabria, where the contagion situation is, however, less serious than in Lombardy, Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta. In recent weeks, weekly infections in Calabria have always been around 100 per 100,000 inhabitants, much less than in the other regions of the red zones (in Lombardy and Piedmont they already exceed 500, in the Aosta Valley they exceed 600 ), and also the Rt index is lower than that of many other regions (between October 19 and 25 it was 1.66 on average, while in Valle d’Aosta it was 1.89, in Lombardy 2, 09 and Piedmont 2, 16), but the regional health service has been in disarray for months and has forced the government to include the region in the red areas.
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The government press release states that the inclusion of Calabria in the “red zones” was decided “due to the ongoing emergency situation and the repeated failure to meet the minimum score provided by the grid of essential levels of assistance (Lea) in the health field and the economic and financial objectives established in the operational programs “. In fact, Calabrian health has been a curator since July 2010, after already in 2008 cases of medical negligence, manipulated budgets and mafia infiltrations were found in local health companies.
Regarding the health situation linked to the pandemic, the main problem is the intensive care beds, which could be largely insufficient if the epidemiological situation worsens in the coming weeks. With the Relaunch decree of last May, the government had prepared new resources for the regions, so that they could reorganize health systems and implement new places of intensive care, around 0.14 beds per thousand inhabitants. Calabria, which before the pandemic had a total of 106 intensive care beds, had received some 65 million euros with the aim of reaching a total of 28 intensive care beds for the autumn.
According to an analysis ofHuffPost During the first phase of the epidemic, 40 beds had been incorporated and in recent days a total of 161 intensive care posts had been reached, of which 57 were dedicated to patients with COVID-19. The plan for the reorganization of the intensive care places would have belonged to Saverio Cotticelli, health commissioner in Calabria appointed in January 2019, but during an interview with the Rai 3 program “Titolo Quinto”, which aired on Friday night He said he knew nothing and believed that the plan should be drawn up by the president of the regional council.
When journalist Walter Molino pointed out that it would be his job to draw up that plan, Cotticelli gave some confusing answers and then presented a document at the end of October – received by the Ministry of Economy and Health – that reaffirmed that in the commissioned regions the plan had it The commissioner had to prepare, he admitted that he had to be the one to prepare the anti-COVID plan.
Following the controversy sparked by this interview, on Saturday morning, under pressure from the Prime Minister, Cotticelli resigned. In his place, the government appointed Giuseppe Zuccatelli, from whom some particularly embarrassing statements immediately emerged. In fact, in the last hours a video of a few months ago, when he was commissioner of the provincial health company (ASP) of Cosenza, has circulated, in which, among other things, he says that “masks are useless” to limit the spread of the coronavirus. . And then he adds, raising his voice considerably: ‘Do you know what it takes? Distance. Because to get the virus if I’m sure, do you know what to do? You have to stay with me and kiss me for 15 minutes with your tongue in my mouth.
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