VO, Italy (AP) – Italy on Sunday a year ago delivered the first shocking confirmation of locally transmitted coronavirus infections outside Asia, with back-to-back revelations of cases more than 150 kilometers apart in the north of the country.
First, a 38-year-old man in Codogno, an industrial town in the Lombardy region, tested positive for COVID-19, which sent panicked residents to pick up their children at school, get supplies in stock and in vain looking for surgical masks at pharmacies.
On the evening of February 21, a 77-year-old retired roofing worker from Vo, a wine-producing town in the Veneto region, died – at the time the first fatal death toll due to a locally transmitted case of the virus in the West, waking up far and wide. alarm clock.
In the days and weeks that followed, the densely populated Lombardy would become the center of the outbreak of Italy, and by the end of March, countries worldwide would be under lockdown to spread the virus that has now taken 2.4 million lives. delayed. But Vo, as one of the first towns in the West to be isolated, has a unique story that offers some of the first scientific insights into the deadly virus.
Adriano Trevisan’s death sent shock waves through the city west of Venice. According to his doctor, dr. Carlo Petruzzi, Trevisan, a well-known in the Vo neighborhood, and a regular card player in a local bar, was hospitalized for two weeks with circulatory issues. . There was no reason to suspect the coronavirus because the retiree has had no contact with China so far.
After being notified of the death, Mayor Giuliano Martini, who is also the city’s chief pharmacist, ordered schools and non-essential businesses to close and prohibit residents from leaving the city, even for work. He called on local volunteer groups to ensure that food and pharmaceutical supplies entering the city are brought to the shelves. The city’s three GPs have been quarantined for alleged burglary, and the nearest hospital, a 30-minute drive away, has been closed.
“It was like a war movie,” Martini said. “We were completely alone.”
Surrounded by vineyards and agricultural land, the city of 3,270 people located against Monte Venda has long enjoyed rural isolation. But three days after Trevisan’s death, its isolation was ensured by government decision: Rome sent troops to seal the town’s 12 access roads. Blockades were also set up in the ten villages near Milan, where the other early case of local transmission was confirmed.
“There was a sense of surprise, I would call it,” said Dr. Luca Rossetto, one of the practitioners in Vo. ‘Even I, with an old specialization in preventive hygiene, must have the right mindset. But there was an absolute disorientation. ”
Rossetto reviewed his recent cases and realized that he had seen seven people with pneumonia-like symptoms in recent days. A week later, the 69-year-old doctor himself was admitted to hospital with the virus, a mild case from which he recovered.
Veneto ruler Luca Zaia, meanwhile, instinctively ordered blanket testing for all of Vo’s residents, with the aim of understanding the origin of the outbreak. That he was even able to make such a call is due to the foresight of Andrea Crisanti, virologist at the University of Padua, who ordered the necessary tools after the virus appeared in China. Many places around the world have struggled to set up testing so quickly.
Crisanti realizes the value of testing the entire city immediately after the infection is confirmed, and then again after two weeks. And his work provides early insight into how the virus spread – clarity that, according to Crisanti, was never properly translated into action.
The results of the first round of nasal swab tests, which were available on February 27, showed that almost 3% of the population was infected. According to Crisanti, this indicated that the virus had been spreading in the city since the end of January.
“With this data, we should have closed Veneto and Lombardy immediately,” Crisanti said. But decision-makers, he said, “do not realize the scale of the problem.”
The question of whether more restrictions on movement should have been introduced earlier was hotly debated in Italy, and many politicians noted that such decisions were extremely difficult as the measures entailed huge economic and social costs and infringed on freedoms. There has even been a criminal investigation into whether officials waited too long to shut down two towns in Lombardy.
The shutdown of Vo was remarkably effective in stopping the transmission. When Crisanti did the second Test round on March 7, no new cases were detected.
Crisanti said the findings – published in June by the journal Nature but immediately known to Italian officials – made it clear that isolation and mass testing were the best way to contain the virus before vaccines.
While Crisanti was able to persuade the Veneto region to increase testing, it was only on March 9 – 17 days after the virus was detected simultaneously in two Italian regions, with cases increasing and a massive exodus to the south was going on – that then- Premier Giuseppe Conte ordered the whole country to have an almost total exclusion that would last seven weeks.
By the end of May, when the number of cases in Italy began to decline, more than 232,684 people were infected, mostly in the north, and 33,415 died.
Scientists still do not know how the virus got into Vo.
Although Veneto was hit at the same time, Veneto fared much better than Lombardy, who became the center of both Italian thrusts. It has half the population and its industry is more dispersed, but experts have also attributed its health care system, which enables close contact between GPs, district administrators and hospital officials and which is less dependent on private facilities. Another important element in the virus fight was the testing system created by Crisanti.
Crisanti urged the government in Rome in August to expand its capacity for nasal swab tests in hopes of keeping transmission low after a successful closure. Although the government did, Crisanti is disappointed that he relied heavily on rapid tests – as many other places have done and as some experts have recommended – rather than using more reliable nose swabs to isolate outbreaks.
In October, Italy had a boom that was even more deadly than the spring peak, with the toll now being close to 95,000. New clusters of a variant first found in Britain have led to localized closures across the country, forcing the cancellation of one of the virus-remembrance events this weekend in Lombardy.
If the virus was caught off guard with the arrival of the virus last February, the long-predicted revival was ‘madness’, Crisanti said.
Vo also experienced a boom that is only now declining. The death toll from the city’s pandemic has doubled to 6.
With an exceptionally high number of restaurants per capita at 45 eateries, Vo is now an echo of his former self. The weddings, baptisms and the first communion that attracted residents from nearby cities to the hill town were limited by restrictions. The closure of restaurants has also forced the Vo wine cooperative to reduce 2020 production. The local dance hall has never been reopened.
Things might have been different, Martini believes.
“The virus in Vo arrived in Vo and died in Vo,” the mayor said of the first cases a year ago. The failure to repeat the model: ‘Ruinous’, he said.