Rome, March 2. The establishment of a “red zone” or isolation at the end of February 2020 in the Seriana Valley (northern Italy) would have avoided the death of more than 4,000 people, according to the prosecutors who investigated the management at the start of the pandemic in this region, the western focus of a virus which has killed nearly 188,000 people in the country.
The public prosecutor’s office in Bergamo (north), which has just completed three years of investigations into the causes of the high number of deaths and possible political responsibilities, charges 19 people with the crimes of aggravated culpable epidemic, multiple culpable homicide and refusal to perform official acts. , including former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza, local media report today.
Although the increase in infections is already known, the “worst case scenario” of the impact on hospitals and intensive care units, and the outbreak of the virus in hospitals, the “red zone” has not not been widened, which favored the spread of the virus .. pandemic in these districts of Bergamo, with an “increase in deaths of 4,148 people”, according to the survey.
In addition to Conte and Speranza, the president of the Lombardy region Attilio Fontana, as well as the president of the Higher Institute of Health, Silvio Brusaferro, and other members of the scientific technical committee, among others, also appear as investigated.
“If they had intervened six days before they were supposed to, 4,000 deaths would have been avoided. Faced with something like this, could I shut down and archive everything?” prosecutor Claudio Chiappani asked in an interview. today in La Stampa.
The prosecutors also accuse the institutional and medical chain of not having applied the regional pandemic plan, in addition to the deficiencies of the Alzano hospital, the neighboring town of Nembro del Valle Seriana, an area of high industrial concentration in the province of Bergamo , in those that were not initially decreed in isolation.
In two “separate emails” dated February 27 and 28, 2020, Fontana asked Conte “to substantially maintain the containment measures already in force in Lombardy, without signaling any criticality regarding the spread of the contagion in the municipalities of the Valle Seriana,” prosecutors said. say, according to the media.
“I immediately anticipate my maximum availability and collaboration with justice,” Conte said on Wednesday, after learning of the first results of the investigation, when he was “calm before the country and the Italian citizens for having acted with the maximum of commitment and common sense”. responsibility in one of the hardest times that our Republic is going through”.
The investigation tried to clarify why at the beginning of the pandemic several areas of the province of Bergamo were not isolated from the start despite the fact that there was data attesting that the virus was already roaming the streets and hospitals of their municipalities.
It all started on February 21, when the first case of contagion was confirmed in the neighboring Lombard town of Codogno. A day later, the government isolates eleven homes, ten municipalities in Lombardy, in the province of Lodi, and another in Veneto (northeast).
However, Nembro and Alzano were not on this list, which would only go into isolation on March 8, and relatives of the victims in both cities denounced that during these two weeks the virus circulated freely, making the situation critical.