ITALY TO TIGHTEN LIMITS AS CASES SURGE

Measures will be most severe since initial lockdown

Italy’s government said Friday that coronavirus restrictions would be severely tightened across much of the country starting Monday and that the entire country would be under lockdown over Easter weekend to beat back surging infections amid a slow vaccine rollout.

The office of Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, announced the measures, which will force more than half of Italy’s population into lockdown. Starting Monday, health authorities will shut down schools, restaurants and many shops in most northern regions as well as the regions of Rome and Naples. People will also be restricted from leaving their homes except for work, health care visits and emergencies.

For Easter weekend, April 3-5, which is usually celebrated with large family gatherings, a lockdown will limit movement to one trip a day out of the home.

The measures are among the strongest since March 2020, when Italy became the first Western country to impose a lockdown in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.

“I am aware that today’s measures will have an impact on children’s education, on the economy and also on the psychological state of us all,” Draghi said during a televised visit Friday to a vaccination hub near Rome. “But they are necessary to avoid a worsening that will make even more stringent measures inevitable. The memory of what happened last spring is still vivid. We will do anything that we can to prevent it from happening again.”

Also Friday, Italy’s Health Ministry applied new criteria to determine when regions are shut down. The restrictions would take effect when the virus caseload surpasses 250 cases per 100,000 residents. Many of the country’s 20 regions are expected to be subjected to the measures.

Italy surpassed 100,000 coronavirus deaths this week, with a current death rate of about 300 per day. The country registered more than 25,000 new infections and 373 deaths Thursday.

Some health officials attribute the rise in contagions and death, especially in central and northern Italy, to the now widespread presence of a more contagious variant first reported in Britain. Italy’s vaccine rollout, as in other European countries, remains slow compared with the United States and Britain. About 7 percent of Italy’s population has been vaccinated.

The country has encountered delays in vaccine deliveries from Pfizer-biontech, Moderna and Astrazeneca. And the country’s own difficulties in managing vaccine distribution in the underdeveloped south and in the wealthy, hard-hit region of Lombardy have also slowed things down.