At the time, Italy had one of the lowest infection rates in the Western world and appeared to have learnt the lessons of the first wave, which killed more people than anywhere else in Europe except Britain.Now it appears that Italy, ahead of the rest of Europe when COVID-19 arrived, was simply behind the curve when it roared back as summer ended.
The government says it wants to avoid another national lockdown and denies failing to anticipate a second wave."There may have been mistakes, you can always do better but we have not underestimated the situation. We have worked on all fronts," Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said last week. In June, the government employed 9,000 people for this. That has risen to just 9,200, a third of the number Germany employs. The state placed adverts last week to recruit another 2,000."We warned the authorities from the very beginning that we would have needed much more people, and people professionally trained, for tracing COVID-19," said Miria De Santis, head of the national association of health assistants.
Another element was meant to be a smartphone app to track infections. As in most of Europe, Italy's app has not performed well. "The task force of experts set up by the Italian government recommended from the start using software able to geolocate detections, because it was reckoned essential to know, for instance, if someone got infected in a nursing home," said Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffe, a professor at Milan's Bocconi University and a government adviser on tracing.
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