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Ten days to decide on further restrictive measures. Lockdown is a taboo in the government, a dirty word, but that’s where it ends. Giuseppe Conte is aware that the measures adopted in Sunday’s dpcm may not be enough. He hopes they are enough, but reality is more stubborn than the rules and intentions, and today’s data that touches 25,000 positives, albeit with the record of swabs, is there to remember it.
“We await the first days of next week – explains a member of the executive – If the closure of restaurants, bars, gyms and swimming pools and the implementation of distance learning have worked we will know only then”. A saving catharsis is not expected, but we hope for a significant slowdown in the growth of infections. What in these hours is called “The plateau”. The numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, but it has been taken into account that, given the current progression, within a week we can reach a quota of 30/35 thousand infections. If the number were to stabilize, it would be a signal that the tightening is having its effects. Otherwise, a lockdown would be assessed, not as stringent as that of last spring but not too far from there.
This is what Giuseppe Conte said when meeting the majority group leaders on Tuesday evening who pressed him on the point: “We have decided on the latest measures to avoid that scenario. We have to wait about ten days, then we will evaluate the epidemiological data and decide ”. It is the second or third episode of a film that seems to have already been seen, the one whose plot includes a dpcm, the subsequent confidence that the dpcm will work, the race for a new tougher dpcm, with Piazza Affari which today lost 4% just to hear the word lockdown.
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“We risk arriving late”, a desolate exponent of the majority wing of the majority comments. If it were up to Roberto Speranza and Dario Franceschini, the die would have been cast for some time. In some government chats today the measures announced by Merkel have circulated a lot: total closure of bars and restaurants, bars, swimming pools, gyms, cinemas and theaters, the possibility of meeting only between two families. “And they do it with less than half of the infections we have, we are one step away from losing control”, explains a member of the penalty wing. Germany the benchmark to refer to, Paris the city to look at. Macron has announced drastic measures to stop the infection in the face of unthinkable figures until just two weeks ago, a harbinger of a bleak future in the Belpaese too. Because if it is true that the transalpines are ten days ahead of us, at most two weeks, we can anticipate decisions that are becoming necessary throughout Europe, starting with the two countries that drive it and which, like us, are overwhelmed. from the second wave.
It is also for this reason that the government through Francesco Boccia has announced that it will challenge the ordinances that want to expand the meshes of the dpcm, such as those of South Tyrol and Sicily (for now only announced) which extend the opening hours of bars and restaurants until 11pm.
If anything, the shirts must shrink, not widen. The establishment of targeted red zones in areas where the infection is particularly widespread is being studied in these hours. The cases under the magnifying glass are Lombardy and Campania, and in particular Milan and Naples, because, explains those who are working on the dossier, “big cities are the areas where the curve could suddenly shoot up suddenly from a day to day for their population density “.
The last taboo left in these bleak times, the lockdown, trembles, wobbles, sways. Ten days to understand if it will fall. Ten days if all goes well, because no one can rule out in the current state of things that it will not go well.
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