The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has grown by 662 to 8,165, the Civil Protection Agency said on Thursday.Spain’s coronavirus death toll surged above 4,000 on Thursday but the increase in both fatalities and new infections slowed, leaving officials hopeful a nationwide lockdown is starting to curb the spread of the disease.
In a latest report regarding the huge spread of COVID19 in Italy and Spain point into a major common reason.
A football match last month that sparked euphoria in Bergamo has taken on a much darker relevance in the epicentre of Italy’s deadliest Covid-19 outbreak.
The 19 February Champions League contest reportedly drew over 40,000 residents of Bergamo to nearby Milan to see their hometown squad, Atalanta, take on Spain’s Valencia. Atalanta’s 4-1 first-leg victory, in the upstart side’s inaugural trip to the knockout rounds of the world’s most prestigious club competition, had those closely packed residents and thousands more back home hugging in raucous celebration.
Weeks later, Bergamo has earned the tragic distinction of being the hardest-hit province in the hardest-hit region, Lombardy, of Europe’s hardest-hit country. The spread of the novel coronavirus has swelled the daily obituary section in Bergamo’s local newspaper from two or three pages to as much as 10 or 11. Intensive care units there don’t have nearly enough beds, and Italian soldiers are being deployed to move coffins from Bergamo’s overwhelmed morgues.
Among the “sad explanations” for the plight, there is the football match, the mayor of Bergamo, a town of approximately 120,000 that has the same name as its province, said on Tuesday.
“Some 40,000 Bergamo inhabitants went to Milan to watch the game. Others watched it from their homes, in families, in groups, at the bar,” said Mayor Giorgio Gori (via Agence France-Presse).
“It’s clear that evening was a situation in which the virus was widely spread,” he added.
Noting that many travelled on public transportation together from Bergamo before packing into Milan’s San Siro stadium, the head of pulmonology at a Bergamo hospital recently described the Champions League match as “a biological bomb”.
At the time, few in Italy were greatly concerned about Covid-19. Two days after the match was played, though, the country saw its first confirmed death from the illness, and within two weeks Bergamo was reporting a sharp increase in its rate of coronavirus cases.
Six days after the match in Valencia, that club announced that “despite the strict measures” it adopted after travelling to Milan’s “high risk” area, 35 per cent of its starters tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Atalanta said Tuesday (via Reuters) that its goalkeeper, Marco Sportiello, became the first on its club and the 15th in Italy’s Serie A to test positive.
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