According to Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, on Monday the number of deaths reported from the coronavirus COVID-19 dropped for the second straight day.
602 people were reported to have died on Monday, with 4,789 new cases of the disease reported. On Sunday 5,560 new cases had been reported, with 651 deaths; on Saturday 793 deaths were reported, as The Sun noted.
The total number of fatalities in the month since the disease struck Italy is numbered at 6,077; confirmed cases of the disease have been numbered at 63,927. The Sun opined, “The drop in the rate of deaths and new infections indicates that the curve may be finally starting to flatten out, two weeks after the entire country was placed into lockdown … Since February, Italy had been following an exponential growth curve with cases and deaths roughly doubling every three days.”
Still, Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza warned, “These are crucial days. Woe to whoever lets down the guard. Now more than ever, the commitment of everyone is needed.”
One of Italy’s top health officials, Silvio Brusaferro, echoed, “We need more consecutive results to confirm the trend, to be more certain that we are in a favorable situation … I don’t feel like taking one side or the other to confirm that it is there or not. We can take note of what we see today.”
The Sun said Lombardy health commissioner Giulio Gallera revealed on Monday there were 29,761 new cases, a day-to-day increase of 1,555; on Saturday a one-day jump of 3,200 was recorded. Gallera said, “Maybe this is the first positive day of this very difficult month. It is not time to relax. We need to be even more coherent.”
As The Daily Wire reported, Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt said last week that Italy was nearing a slowdown in infection rates, saying, “Italy is already half way through the disease. There has been a decrease in growth in the number of deaths in Italy in the past 2-3 days …If Italy measured cases like Korea, there would have been 10 times more cases …South Korea is already in the slow-down phase, he said, and Italy is nearing the same point …To put things in proportion, the number of deaths of coronavirus in Italy is 10% of the number of deaths of influenza in the country between 2016-2017.”
Levitt pointed out, “Italian culture is very warm, and Italians have a very rich social life. For these reasons, it is important to keep people apart and prevent sick people from coming into contact with healthy people.”
The Daily Wire noted Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi wrote an op-ed for The Boston Globe in which he stated:
We of course couldn’t stop the emergence of a previously unknown and deadly virus. But we could have mitigated the situation we are now in, in which people who could have been saved are dying. I, and too many others, could have taken a simple yet morally loaded action: We could have stayed home.
What has happened in Italy shows that less-than-urgent appeals to the public by the government to slightly change habits regarding social interactions aren’t enough when the terrible outcomes they are designed to prevent are not yet apparent; when they become evident, it’s generally too late to act. I and many other Italians just didn’t see the need to change our routines for a threat we could not see.