Italy announces an investigation into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic
Italy will launch an investigation into its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a move hailed as “a great victory” by relatives of those killed by the virus but criticized by those in power at the time.
Italy was the first Western country to report an outbreak and has the second highest death toll from Covid-19 in Europe to date at more than 196,000. Only the death toll in Great Britain is higher.
The establishment of a committee to investigate “the actions of the government and the measures taken by it to prevent and address the epidemiological emergency of Covid-19” was approved by the lower house of Parliament after approval by the Senate.
An investigation into Covid-19 was among the promises in the election campaign of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right government came to power in October 2022.
The victims’ families had protested against an investigation proposal from the previous government, a huge coalition led by Mario Draghi, after attempts by the center-left Democratic Party (PD) and the League, which governs the worst-hit region of Lombardy, to reduce its scope by focusing only on the outbreak in China and introducing a cut-off date of January 31, 2020, leaving the Italian government’s battle to deal with rapidly rising infections and deaths in the weeks that followed unexamined.
Consuelo Locati, a lawyer representing hundreds of families who have taken legal action against former leaders, said: “The families were the first to ask for a commission and so for us this is a big victory. The commission is important because it has the task, at least on paper, to analyze what went wrong and what mistakes were made, to prevent the carnage we have all suffered from being repeated.”
The commission will investigate the actions of individuals including Giuseppe Conte, the former prime minister, Roberto Speranza, the former health minister, and Attilio Fontana, the president of Lombardy.
Conte, who now heads the Five Star Movement, which was in government with the PD at the time, accused Meloni’s government of “cowardice” and of creating “an abnormal instrument” to politically attack its predecessors. “But you don’t rule for life and this could prove to be a dangerous precedent,” he said, adding that he had “nothing to hide.”
Speranza claimed that the committee’s goal was not to make the health care system more resilient, but to smear the former administration.
In June last year, prosecutors in Bergamo, the Lombardy province hit hard by Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic, suspended an investigation into Conte and Speranza’s handling of the emergency after finding no evidence that the deaths linked to their inability to take prompt action. measures to contain the escalating virus.
The first case of coronavirus in Italy was confirmed on February 21, 2020 in Codogno in southern Lombardy. Two days later, an outbreak occurred at the hospital in Alzano Lombardo, a town in Bergamo. Unlike Codogno, where quarantine measures were immediately introduced along with nine other cities in Lombardy and one in Veneto, Bergamo went into lockdown two weeks later along with the entire Lombardy region.
A case has been brought by relatives of the deceased in the civil court of Rome. The court is examining the same evidence as Bergamo prosecutors, including the alleged absence of an updated national pandemic plan. “The difference with the Rome case is that there will certainly be a verdict, which will either be in our favor or not,” said Locati, whose father was among those who died early in the pandemic.