COVID-19: What Can the World Learn From Italy?
The following perspective about lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy appeared in Medscape UK and can be found here.
The first case of COVID-19 appeared in Italy on January 30th. A couple of Chinese tourists coming from Wuhan via Beijing were admitted to Spallanzani Hospital in Rome, highly specialised in infectious diseases. The same day, the Minister of Health Roberto Speranza announced an air traffic embargo for flights coming to Italy from any Chinese city, including the autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau, in an attempt to block the spread of the infection.
In the days following the hospitalization of the Chinese couple in Rome, a few new cases were detected in a group of Italians who were repatriated from the Wuhan region. Experts started to sigh in relief as all cases came from abroad and no local contagion seemed to show up.