Italy’s former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is under investigation for having waited too long before imposing lockdown measures in the Val Seriana region of Lombardy, as COVID-19 spread in March 2020.
At the end of a nearly three-year-long inquest, judges in Bergamo accused Conte and sixteen other senior government officials — including the then-health minister Roberto Speranza — of turning down public health advice to impose restrictions in the COVID-stricken area early on.
Conte waited until March 7 to impose a region-wide lockdown in Lombardy, weeks after health advisers had first warned about the need for tough measures in the Val Seriana area.
The regional governor of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, is also under investigation, and all sixteen officials risk facing the charges in court.
According to public health expert Andrea Crisanti, who advised the Bergamo judges, the government’s dithering caused 4,000 extra deaths in the area.
The Val Seriana region was hard hit by the first wave of coronavirus in March 2020, prompting a 10-fold increase in the number of deaths compared to the same period in 2019.
“I am calm […] as I’ve operated with the highest effort and sense of responsibility during one of the most difficult moments of our republican history,” said Conte in response.
The association of the families of COVID-19 victims wrote in a statement that, “from now on we’re rewriting the history of the massacre in Bergamo and Lombardy, the history of our families, of the responsibilities behind our losses,” pointing out that the deaths “were not caused by COVID-19 but by precise decisions, or lack of decisions.”
