The double swindle of diaper masks (with Lombard money)

In the highlights of the emergency coronavirus, when masks were scarce not only for citizens, but also for health personnel, Region Lombardy decided to have a large number of skins produced, then renamed ”diaper”, spending the beauty of 8.1 million euros. In March they were greeted as a blessing, only to be uncomfortable and unusable, and ended up in the darkness of a warehouse in no time. A case generated by the rush to reconvert the most acute period of the emergency, which is now back in fashion, given that Lombardy seems willing to remove the masks from oblivion to donate them to Kazakhstan. A ” present ” that, however, must provide, according to the reconstruction of The impression, a second payment.

Diaper masks from the Lombardy region

But before we delve into the gift question, let’s recall the surreal story of diaper masks from the beginning. At the beginning of the emergency, many companies decided to reconvert their production to make products that were necessary and missing in that period. Among these was also the Fippi of Rho changed from diapers to personal protective equipment, which at the time served as bread. Thus, the Region governed by Attilio Fontana He did not think about it more than once and decided to order 18 million through Aria Spa, the only shopping center in Lombardy. The intention was to support the health system and provide new devices to doctors and nurses committed to fighting the coronavirus. The result, sadly, was quite different.

When the masks arrived in hospitals, their appearance and effectiveness were far from expected: they were not filtration by the material used and were not sterile because to take them it was necessary to pass them through the head A nice mess that led the Cobas to report the case to the Prosecutor’s Office, with the masks that, after the opening of an investigation, ended up relegated to a Fiera di Foundation warehouse. Milan.

Then, when everyone seemed to have forgotten about the masks, here’s the unexpected twist: With two resolutions on Sept. 7, the Fontana board decided to remove the devices from the warehouse and donate a million to the Kazakhstan e 500 thousand ad Areu, the emergency-urgency agency that will keep them as a reserve in its warehouses. But this is where the new mess comes in, as La Stampa writes: “ Given that Fippi masks for sanitary use were priced by Aria Spa for € 0.45 + VAT, equivalent to a total cost of € 823,500 for 1.5 million of pieces, the city council decides to buy them for this amount of the chapter of expenses of purchase of goods for humanitarian aid ”.

The deception of paying for diaper masks

What does that mean? In other words, the Region must reimburse Aria Spa, the subsidiary to which it had already given the money to buy the 18 million pieces produced by Fippi. Lombardy may try to recover part of the sum spent through Civil Protection, but reimbursement is far from safe. Meanwhile, from the Region they let it be known that it is not a second payment “but a new order necessary to keep our stock level unaltered.” Regional councilor Pietro Bussolati commented on the story: “They are ashamed to give diapers before they bragged to the health workers, they try to send them elsewhere and now the Lombard taxpayers are forced to return them to a branch in the Region itself. “

Where is the truth? Bringing it out will, in all likelihood, be an investigation. In fact, today theUSB Lombardy (Unione Sindacale di Base) filed another complaint related to the management of the covid emergency at the ASST in Lecco before the Public Ministry of Lecco. ” We want to stand out – read the note The union: all critical aspects of the Lombard health system, as it emerged during the epidemic, from the repeated destruction of local services, to the overuse of outsourcing and contracting, which turned out to be another Achilles heel of the system, before the specific impossibility of fully controlling the contracting companies, especially regarding compliance with security protocols. A system that no longer has the protection of health as a priority and has become, instead, profit: which explains well the proliferation of private health in the region that already reaches around 50% of the services provided ‘ ‘.

The statement continues with the response of the councilor Cockpit, who yesterday described the filing of such a complaint as ” sad ”: ” There are many other sad things that we have witnessed. Sad is the destruction of local services, especially prevention; It is sad to have wasted millions of euros for the hospital at the fair that was useless for anything or anyone; It is sad to see the former president of the Region Bobo Maroni on the Board of Directors of the largest national private health group, Grupo San Donato. It is sad to see that, despite everything that has happened, the Region continues with its policy of entrusting important health services to individuals, confirming the now inextricable links between public administrators and private health entrepreneurs; It was sad to have had to attend, in the midst of the epidemic, days of judicial news about the traffic between the region and the relatives of President Fontana. Very sad is the Region’s decision to allow positive patients to enter the RSA, where more than 10,000 deaths have been counted. But above all sad, tragic and comical at the same time is knowing that the regional health system is in the hands of a councilor who made the world laugh by declaring that having an Rt index of 0.51 means that to infect a healthy person there is to come into contact at the same time. with two infected subjects. ”