Italian court throws out case alleging early pandemic mismanagement by ex-premier, ex-minister

A special Italian court has shut down a probe into whether the country’s former premier and former health minister caused unnecessary deaths by failing to extend a lockdown zone in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Court of Ministers in Brescia threw out the case against ex-Premier Giuseppe Conte and ex-Health Minister Roberto Speranza on Wednesday.

The investigation alleged errors were made in not extending a “red zone,” initially imposed on a limited number of towns in northern Italy’s Lombardy and Veneto regions, to neighboring Bergamo as the number of deaths there skyrocketed.

Both officials have said they acted according to scientific knowledge and expert opinion available at the time.

Conte told RAI state TV that the court’s decision “comforts me.”

“We were facing a virus that by then was galloping, and within a few days we made the decision to close other regions in a very strict way,’’ Conte said, adding that the court’s decision also made clear that the government made a reasonable call given the data available.

A court in Bergamo must still decide wither to indict more than a dozen other people. The Court of Ministers handles cases involving Italian Cabinet members.

The three-year-long probe alleges that more than 4,000 deaths could have been prevented if the lockdown had been extended on Feb. 27, 2020, as Bergamo province became Italy’s COVID-19 hot spot.

The city’s morgue was so overwhelmed that the army had to send in trucks to bring coffins to other morgues for cremation.

On Feb. 21, 2020, Italy became the first county outside Asia to confirm a case of COVID-19.

The first “red zones” were imposed three days later around 10 towns in Lombardy and one in Veneto, and extended to all of Lombardy and 14 other provinces in the north on March 8. Conte put the entire country on lockdown two days later.

Italy recorded 188,322 official COVID-19 deaths.

The Court of Ministers in Brescia on Wednesday dismissed the positions of Conte and Speranza in the Bergamo Public Prosecutor's probe, reports Italy's state-run ANSA news agency.

According to judicial sources, the probe was looking into the management of the first phase of the pandemic in Bergamo's Val Seriana, where the two former Minisers were accused of not extending a lockdown to two outlying areas and thereby causing unwarranted deaths.

In their defence, Conte and Speranza have always maintained of acting in accordance with the available scientific data and the opinions of experts.

Bergamo located in Lombardy region was Italy's (and Europe's) first large pandemic hotspot between February and March 2020, reports Xinhua news agency.

The city of around 120, 000 inhabitants accounted for at least 670 victims, and the province, also known as Bergamo with a population of 1.1 million, tallied some 6, 000 fatalities.

On March 18, 2020, long columns of army vehicles plied across the streets of Bergamo carrying hundreds of coffins to various cemeteries.

Lombardy was where the virus first started spreading in Europe and more than half the victims in Italy died in the region.

In April 2020, Conte had denied claims that he underestimated the crisis.

He said that if he had ordered a lockdown at the beginning, when the first virus clusters were detected, "people would have taken me for a madman".

The then Prime Minister had also dismissed a suggestion that Italy could have rapidly imposed a big lockdown.

A year ago Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was facing multiple domestic crises and in charge of an unstable government made up of two parties that had spent the previous five years as sworn and bickering enemies. Few in Rome believed he would last much longer than six months.

Read more - Firenewsfeed