Alarm coronavirus in Italy, patients zero are missing

By Victoria Hudson.

The number of coronavirus deaths in Italy rises to 4. According to official sources from the Lombardy Region, an 84-year-old man from Bergamo, hospitalized in the "Papa Giovanni XXIII" hospital of the Lombard city for previous diseases, died on Sunday from coronavirus. Thus, the number of coronavirus deaths in Italy rises to four: in all cases, these are elderly people with a previously compromised general clinical picture.

The president of the Lombardy region, Attilio Fontana, said that there are 165 cases in the region. Added to the 27 in the Veneto with two new cases announced on Monday morning, the 16 of Emilia Romagna seven registered on Monday, three in Piedmont and one in Lazio where two people have recovered, there are a total of 212 confirmed cases in Italy.

Italy is the third country in the world in terms of a number of infections, after China and South Korea. According to experts, this primacy is attributable to a more widespread control over patients who presented with flu symptoms. In commenting on the extraordinary measures launched by the government, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that the number of infections is expected to grow.

With cases increasing throughout Northern Italy, one figure worries epidemiologists, virologists and infectious disease specialists: none of the people affected have been to China recently. People expected to deal with sick people who returned from the Wuhan area and instead have to deal with autochthonous infected people, which also worries the World Health Organization (WHO).

Zero cases are missing. Of the three outbreaks in Veneto and that in Lombardy, it is not possible to reconstruct the origin, that is, the contact of at least one patient with someone who has returned from China. The only suspect, the Lombard manager from Castiglione d'Adda, was "exonerated" by the serological tests. "It is the scenario that I have always feared and has come true: the first person infected is an Italian who has never been to the eastern countries", Giovanni Rezza, head of the infectious diseases of the Higher Institute of Health said. WHO sent a team to Italy to understand better what’s going on.