Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

Al Jazeera: Some say the current lockdown should have been implemented earlier. Has a delay made the situation more critical?

Cartabellotta: Following the announcement of the first few cases in Italy, we immediately understood we would have gone through such a vast epidemic. The COVID-19 outbreak was driven by the spread in hospitals in Italy. In such cases, the number of infected patients skyrockets very fast.

Before Monday, measures had been taken in fits and starts because of political and economic factors amid an attempt to protect the national economy, without considering in full all the evaluations that we had presented at the institutional level.

Italian politics took a wait-and-see approach. More or less rigorous measures have been taken based on what was unfolding on the ground. But the virus doesn't work this way. The virus moves extremely quickly.

We would have needed to take such draconian containment measures for the whole country since March 1. It doesn't make sense to put regional, provincial or city borders in such a situation. A policy of procrastination is not a solution amid an epidemic.

But Europe is just doing the same. There hasn't been any coordination at the European level on this issue, no preparation plan in case of a pandemic neither at the national nor at the bloc level. I'm not aware of any European country having a plan against a pandemic ready to be rolled out.

Policies like those implemented by China's ruling Communist party that closed down Hubei for about three weeks are those that really pay off at the moment. We are seeing their positive results as China is now getting out of the tunnel. All other partial containment measures are not proportioned to the speed of the virus.

Politics hasn't understood how this virus spreads yet. Each country thought of itself as being immune from the infection, as if the virus would have never reached its borders.

Decisions are simply taken as events precipitate.

Al Jazeera: How would you characterise the current situation?

Cartabellotta: We have been seeing an ever-growing increase of the number of cases in other regions as of March 1. So far, there hasn't been any positive effect resulting from the containment measures previously implemented. Based on the data we gathered, we are recording a daily increase of the cases by 25 percent. Until the moment that the containment measures start showing some results, this rate will stay pretty much stable, unless a new vast outbreak emerges.

Lethality in Italy is higher than China because we are only doing swab tests on patients with symptoms, while we have estimated that asymptomatic cases might be around 15,000 at the moment. We are just scratching the surface of the virus diagnostics here. Also, the 6.1 percent lethality rate registered in Lombardy, shows that the healthcare system no longer holds. More people are dying because the system is saturated.