Half of Italy’s 20 regions, including the cities of Rome, Milan and Venice, will enter new coronavirus restrictions from Monday 15 March. The measures will be in effect until April 6, according to a decision passed by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s cabinet on Friday.
In regions demarcated as ‘red zones’, people will not be able to leave their homes except for work or health reasons, with all non-essential shops closed. In ‘orange zones’, people are also prohibited from leaving their town and region – except for work or health reasons – and pubs and restaurants can only provide delivery and removal services.
Affected regions will be marked red or orange, depending on the level of infestation. Regions that report weekly Covid-19 cases of more than 250 per 100,000 inhabitants will also be closed automatically, which means that other regions may also be affected during this period.
The Ministry of Health said that the aim of the measures was to reduce the R rate – the number of people on which one infected person would transmit the virus – to 1.
In addition, the whole country will be considered a “red zone” during the Easter weekend and will be under surveillance from 3 to 5 April.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said new coronavirus measures were ‘necessary’ because ‘we’ are unfortunately facing a new wave of infections’ one year after the start of the pandemic.
The country’s R rate is now at 1.6 with coronavirus variants increasing the spread of the virus, according to the Ministry of Health.
The variant B.1.1.7, which was first identified in the United Kingdom, is now also common in the country, according to the Ministry of Health, who also said that they are concerned about the presence of small bunches of the Brazilian variant .
The prime minister said at a vaccination center at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on Friday that he understood the toll that closures were taking on society, but the forthcoming measures were a necessary step to ensure that the situation did not deteriorate further.
“I am aware that the measures of today will have consequences for the education of children, for the economy and also for the psychological state of us all,” Draghi said.
Italy was under national exclusion from March to May 2020, but there have since been many localized closures in regions in Italy.
A long road ahead
In the past week, there were 150,175 new coronavirus infections, according to Draghi nearly 15% from the previous week.
On Thursday alone, Italy reported more than 25,000 new daily cases. It was the highest record since November – and it jumped to more than 26,000 cases on Friday.
In the past two weeks, there were also another 5,000 people in hospital with Covid-19, with the number of intensive care units increasing by more than 650, he said.
Along with the exclusion, the prime minister also promised to speed up the country’s vaccination program, even as Italy banned the use of vaccines from a specific amount of AstraZeneca doses after the death of a civil servant in Sicily, which one day after ‘ a cardiac arrest death received its first dose of the vaccine.
Draghi said the suspension of the specific AstraZeneca group of the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA) was a precautionary decision, in line with what has been done in other European countries. ‘
The European Union’s medical regulator, the EMA, is currently investigating whether the shot can be linked to a number of reports of blood clots.
Draghi added that “the opinion of AIFA, which is shared by scientists, is that there is no evidence that these events are related to the administration of the vaccine,” he added.
“There is currently no indication that vaccination has caused these conditions, which are not listed as side effects with this vaccine,” the EMA said in a statement Thursday.
“Regardless of the final decision of the EMA, I can assure you that the vaccination campaign will continue with new intensity,” Draghi continued.
Only 3.08% (1,861,852 people) of the eligible population of Italy have been fully vaccinated so far, with 6,219,849 doses administered, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
CNN’s Nicola Ruotolo and Antonia Mortensen contributed to this report.