VO, Italy (AP) – Italy provided the first shocking confirmation of locally transmitted coronavirus infections outside of Asia, a year ago on Sunday, with back-to-back disclosures of cases more than 150 kilometers north of the country.
First, a 38-year-old man from Codogno, an industrial town in the Lombardy region, tested positive for COVID-19, sending panicked residents to pick up their children from school, to stock up on shops. food and look in vain for surgical masks at pharmacies.
By the evening of February 21, a 77-year-old retired roofer in Vo, a wine town in the Veneto region, had died – at the time, the first known death from a virus case transmitted locally in the West, ringing bells wide and wide alarm.
In the days and weeks that follow, densely populated Lombardy will become the epicenter of the outbreak of Italy, and by the end of March, countries around the world will be blocked to slow the spread of the virus that has now claimed 2.4 million lives. But Vo, one of the first isolated cities in the West, has a unique story, providing some of the first scientific information on the deadly virus.
The death of Adriano Trevisan sent shockwaves through the city of western Venice. Trevisan, known around Vo and accustomed to playing cards in a local bar, had been hospitalized for two weeks with circulatory problems related to a heart condition that could not be solved with medication, according to his doctor, Dr. Carlo Petruzzi. . . There was no reason to suspect the coronavirus – because the pensioner had had no contact with China, a key element in the diagnosis.
After being informed of the death, Mayor Giuliano Martini, who works as the city’s chief pharmacist, ordered the closure of non-essential schools and businesses and banned residents from leaving the city, even for work. He urged local groups of volunteers to ensure that food and pharmaceuticals entering the city are transported on shelves. The three family doctors in the city were quarantined due to the suspect’s contact, and the nearest hospital, a 30-minute drive away, was closed.
“It was like a war movie,” Martini said. “We were completely alone.”
Surrounded by vineyards and farmland, the town of 3,270 people nestled against Monte Venda has long enjoyed a bucolic isolation. But three days after Trevisan’s death, his isolation was ensured by government decree: Rome sent troops to seal the city’s 12 access roads. Blockades were also set up around the 10 cities near Milan, where the other early case of local transmission was confirmed.
“There was a feeling of amazement, I would call it,” said Dr. Luca Rossetto, one of the practitioners in Vo. “Even I, with an old specialization in preventive hygiene, should have the right mentality. But there was an absolute disorientation. “
Rossetto looked at his recent cases and realized he had seen seven people in previous days with pneumonia-like symptoms. One week later, the 69-year-old doctor himself was hospitalized with the virus, an easy case from which he recovered.
Meanwhile, the governor of Veneto, Luca Zaia, instinctively ordered the blanket to be tested for all the inhabitants of Vo, in order to understand the origin of the outbreak. The fact that he was able to make such an appeal is due to the prediction of the virologist of the University of Padua, Andrea Crisanti, who had ordered the necessary tools after the virus appeared in China. Many places around the world have struggled to set up tests so quickly.
Crisanti acknowledged that it would be worth testing the entire city immediately after the contagion was confirmed and then again after two weeks. And his work provided an early perspective on how the virus spread – a clarity that Crisanti said was never properly translated into action.
The results of the first round of nasal swab tests, available on February 27, showed that almost 3% of the population was infected. This indicated that the virus had been circulating in the city since the end of January, according to Crisanti.
“With this data, we should have closed both Veneto and Lombardy immediately,” Crisanti said. But decision makers, he said, “did not perceive the scale of the problem.”
The question of whether more traffic restrictions should have been imposed earlier has been debated in Italy, with many politicians noting that such decisions have been extremely difficult, given that the measures come at a heavy economic and social cost and violate freedoms. . There is even a criminal investigation to find out if officials have waited too long to close two cities in Lombardy.
Vo stop has proven to be extremely effective in stopping the transmission. When Crisanti conducted the second round of tests on March 7, no new cases were detected.
Crisanti said the findings – which were published in the journal Nature in June but immediately known to Italian officials – made it clear that isolation and mass testing are the best way to contain the virus before vaccines.
While Crisanti managed to convince the Veneto region to increase the tests, it was not until March 9 – 17 days after the virus was detected simultaneously in two Italian regions, with cases multiplying and a mass exodus to the south. In the process – then – Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered an almost total blockade of the whole country that will last seven weeks.
By the end of May, as cases began to recede in Italy, more than 232,684 people had been infected, mostly in the north, and 33,415 had died.
Scientists still don’t know how the virus got into Vo.
Although hit at the same time, Veneto fared much better than Lombardy, which became the epicenter of both Italian growths. It has half the population and its industry is more widespread, but experts have accredited its health system, which allows close contact between family doctors, district administrators and hospital officials and is less dependent on private facilities. Another key element in the fight against viruses was the testing system created by Crisanti.
Crisanti called on the Rome government in August to expand its nasal swab testing capability, hoping to keep transmission low after a successful blockage. While the government has done so, Crisanti is disappointed that it relied heavily on rapid tests – as many other places have done and as recommended by some experts – rather than strategically deploying more reliable nasal swabs to isolate outbreaks.
Until October, Italy was struggling with a renaissance that proved even more deadly than the peak of spring, with the tax now at almost 95,000. New clusters of a variant first found in the UK have led to locks located across the country, forcing the cancellation of one of the virus’s anniversary commemorations this weekend in Lombardy.
If the arrival of the virus in February last year caught the country by surprise, the much-anticipated reappearance of the fall was “madness,” Crisanti said.
And Vo has undergone a rebirth that is only now diminishing. The death toll from the city’s pandemic has doubled to 6.
With an unusually large number of restaurants per capita in 45 restaurants, Vo is now an echo of his former self. Weddings, baptisms and first communions that attracted residents of nearby towns to the hill town were limited by restrictions. The closure of the restaurants has also forced the Vo wine cooperative to reduce production by 2020. The local dance hall has never reopened.
Things could have been different, Martini believes.
“The virus from Vo arrived in Vo and died in Vo,” the mayor said of the first cases a year ago. Failure to repeat the pattern: “Ruinous,” he said.