Italy’s Lombardy accused of underestimating virus stats
The Italian region at the epicentre of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, Lombardy, is underestimating its infection figures, a public health expert charged yesterday.
“There is a reasonable suspicion of this,” Nino Cartabellotta, head of the Fondazione GIMBE, a health think tank, told the Radio 24 broadcaster.
“Too many odd things have happened” with Lombardy’s statistics, including gaps and delays in reporting, and an overestimation of recovered patients, he added.
“It’s as if there was a kind of necessity to keep diagnosed numbers under a certain level,” Cartabellotta said, suggesting that there may be problems stemming from a conflict of interest.
He said Italy’s regions, except for Valle d’Aosta and the Trento province, were testing too few people, presumably out of fear of uncovering too many new cases of coronavirus.
Italy’s first locally-transmitted coronavirus case was detected on February 20 in the northern region of Lombardy, which includes Milan, Italy’s business and fashion capital.
Cartabellotta’s accusation came amid government warnings that regions with too many infections may be excluded from an upcoming decision to allow travel to resume between regions from June 3.
“If we reopen too early, and we also play with the figures, then it is obvious that the political will is not to control the epidemic but to restart all activities as soon as possible,” Cartabellotta said.
According to the professor, Valle d’Aosta and Trento are conducting around 4,200 coronavirus swab tests per 100,000 residents, compared with 1,2001,500 for Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria and Emilia-Romagna.
In a tweet, he said that Lombardy, Liguria and Piedmont “are not ready” for a reopening of inter-regional travel, also because they show the highest number of positive cases relative to swab tests.
The Lombardy region called Cartabellotta’s accusations “very serious, offensive and above all not true”, and said its statistics are certified by the National Health Institute.
On Wednesday, 384 of 584 new Italian coronavirus cases were diagnosed in Lombardy.
The region also reported 58 of the 117 additional deaths nationwide.
On Sunday, eyebrows were raised when Lombardy reported zero deaths from Covid-19, compared to 56 on Saturday, 34 on Monday and 26 on Tuesday.
The Covid-19 respiratory disease is caused by the highly-contagious coronavirus.
It later emerged that the Brescia province reported two deaths on Sunday, but they were not taken into account into official regional statistics.
Lombardy’s Health Commissioner Giulio Gallera and President Attilio Fontana have come in for harsh criticism amid reports that they did not protect nursing homes from the virus.
Last week Gallera earned ridicule for flunking an explanation of the reproduction number, a key virus statistic, while Fontana said on Wednesday that he had been given a police escort after receiving hate messages.