By: Felicia LaLomia
Andra tutto bene: “Everything will be alright.”
As a sign of a small victory, health officials in Italy are seeing active cases of coronavirus drop for the first time since February. Although the drop was small, only 20 cases, everyday fewer people are testing positive, and fewer COVID-19 patients are in the hospital or intensive care units, according to information provided by worldmeters.info.
Other numbers in Italy are also improving. The number of new cases of COVID-19 is dropping overall. The country hit its peak on March 21, with 6,557 new cases reported. That number has been overall dropping since with 3,370 new cases reported on April 22.
Coronavirus has hit Italy hard, where close to 26,000 people have died from the disease. That number comes in second, falling only behind the U.S., where more than 42,000 people have died. Italians are coming up on their seventh week of living under lockdown, and those mandates will continue through May 3 at least, with most businesses closed. Last week, however, some stores were allowed to re-open, such as bookstores and baby supply stores, and the country will be looking to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte for an update soon.
Last week, Conte stated that he would be announcing plans to have the country slowly exit the lockdown plan, but only in line with “serious scientific policy.”
“I would like to be able to say, let’s open everything. Right away,” he wrote. “But such a decision would be irresponsible. It would make the contagion curve rise uncontrollably and would jeopardize all the efforts that we’ve made until now.”
With the improvement in critical numbers of COVID-19 patients and plans to start to re-open the country, normal life seems to be closer than ever for Italians. But Conte added that Italy “cannot abandon the line of maximum caution.”
