I’ll explain the government disasters on Covid

“Since May, the end of the first wave, nothing has been done to date to avoid having to fight the virus again with our bare hands. And the main responsibility lies with the government, which in addition to its powers in health matters also has those which replace the powers of the regions with regard to health protection ».

Giuseppe Valditara, a jurist from the University of Turin, coordinator of the Lettera150 think tank, speaks , who together with the sociologist Luca Ricolfi, the historian Giovanni Orsina, the virologist Andrea Crisanti , and other scholars of various disciplines, launched a truthful operation on the errors made in managing the epidemic.

Swabs, flu vaccines, but also transport, school and tracking, there are ten dossiers on which, experts say, the government had to do and did not do or did little.

Question. Why do you put the main responsibility on the government?

Reply. The Constitution provides that the competence for the treatment of pandemics that have an international character lies exclusively with the government. And this is it. Beyond the international prophylaxis, the government is also responsible for setting guidelines and therefore coordination in the field of health protection and has the power / duty to replace regional and municipal bodies to protect public safety. And the responsibility, this time exclusive, for the information, statistical and IT coordination of the data of the state, regional and local administration also falls on the government. An epidemic cannot be fought effectively if the data that recount it are not put into a system and made available for the analysis of the scientific community and the choices of political decision makers.

D. So what?

A. And therefore, from tampons to intensive care, from transport to school, from tracing the infected to home medical assistance, from Covid hotels to flu vaccines, the government's management was a failure. There were things that had to and could be done that were not done. The sacrifices of the Italians, imprisoned for 2 months between March and April, have been thrown away. The contagion curve has restarted and we are again with the hospitals at the end and the freedoms of individuals and entrepreneurs restricted.

Q. Do the regions and municipalities decide on transport?

A. The government, faced with a high-risk situation, had the powers to intervene. Extraordinary funding had to be foreseen with stringent timing of use and a national coordination of regions and municipalities. The current procurement code allows the use of emergency procedures that would have allowed the purchase or rental of new vehicles in a month. In the meantime, the temporary hiring of the necessary drivers had to be financed, unfortunately there are many unemployed drivers.

D. In the document you ask that the daily capacity of the system to make swabs be strengthened. How?

A. Already in mid-May a study by professors Paolo Gasparini, of the University of Trieste, and Francesco Curcio, of the University of Udine, had shown the need to avoid the re-explosion of the virus to make more swabs in order to isolate the outbreaks before flare up. The study indicated the methods and funds needed to structure the collection and processing. With a good organization of the centers it could have reached over a million tampons a day.

D. You also accuse the government of having done nothing to encourage territorial medicine.

R. Luigi Cavanna, head physician of Piacenza and pioneer of home care, said this in your newspaper and demonstrated it in practice: Covid patients must be treated as much as possible at home, they must not go to hospitals, they must not get to have need for resuscitation. But this is feasible above all by investing resources and reorganizing territorial medicine with precise national directives. The agreement with general practitioners to make swabs in their studies was instead signed only in these hours and is not yet operational.