More than 100,000 dead in Italy: Draghi draws a grim pandemic balance

More than 100,000 dead in Italy
Draghi draws a grim pandemic balance sheet

Italy's new prime minister has to ask his compatriots for patience in the corona pandemic: The number of deaths exceeds one hundred thousand, the incidence is rising again and the vaccination campaign is not yet bringing any relief. Professionals doubt whether it was wise to immunize health workers first.

Italy has officially crossed the threshold of 100,000 corona deaths. Another 318 people have been shown to have died with or from the virus within 24 hours. The authorities in the country with 60 million inhabitants have registered a total of 100,103 corona victims since the pandemic began more than a year ago. Italy was hit by the Sars-CoV-2 virus earlier and more violently than other countries in Europe in the spring of last year. The country is currently fighting against the significantly increasing number of infections.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi asked his compatriots for confidence. If the vaccination campaign is accelerated as planned, there will be reason to trust an improvement, said the former President of the European Central Bank (ECB) in a video message. The first hard corona lockdown began in Italy on March 10th last year. "We never thought that a year later we would face a similar emergency and that the official death toll would approach the horrific 100,000 threshold," Draghi said. He assured: "Every life counts."

The 73-year-old has been in office since mid-February. With a total of 100,103 fatalities, Italy ranks sixth worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins University in the USA. Most of the dead then have to mourn the United States. Germany has so far recorded around 72,000 virus deaths. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health in Rome, around 3.08 million people in Italy were infected with the virus. The infection situation has been worsening for several weeks. The number of new infections reported within seven days per 100,000 inhabitants was 195 cases at the end of February. For comparison: In Germany, the seven-day incidence on Monday was 68.

Death numbers remain high, schools are closing again

The government tightened the corona restrictions for several of the 20 regions on Monday. The holiday region Campania in the south was declared the third federal state to be a red zone, in which people should stay at home as far as possible. More and more schools are being closed again. Restaurants in badly affected areas are no longer allowed to open. The daily death toll is considered to be comparatively high.

The newspaper "La Repubblica" quoted experts with the assumption that Italy's vaccination strategy could be partly responsible for the fact that the number of victims is not yet falling. Rome initially focused on medical staff. Although Italy has one of the oldest populations internationally, the very old have been grouped behind it. Around 5.4 million doses of vaccine have been injected since the end of December. 2.5 million of these were given to health care workers.

. (tagsToTranslate) Politics (t) Italy (t) Corona crisis (t) Corona vaccine