Tag Archives: COVID-19

U.S. tops 18 million COVID-19 cases as officials eye new virus variant in UK

By Susan Heavey and Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) – Total U.S. COVID-19 cases surpassed 18 million on Tuesday as health officials tried to tamper fears about a new, highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom.

Reports of the new virus variant in England, which prompted a pre-Christmas lockdown and caused dozens of countries to close their borders to British travelers this week, have spurred talks among government officials of mandatory COVID-19 testing for travelers from the UK and a possible quarantine mandate.

News of the coronavirus mutation comes as the United States deals with a surge in new infections that is overwhelming hospitals in some states. The latest million cases were recorded in just six days, according to a Reuters tally, as U.S. COVID-19 fatalities approach 320,000, the most in the world.

Some U.S. health officials on Tuesday sought to assuage fears about the new virus variation, saying that it should be monitored, but that its discovery should not be cause for despair.

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar told Fox News on Tuesday that both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which received U.S. emergency use authorizations this month, should be effective at preventing illness from the recently discovered variant of the virus. He also said it did not seem to have different physical effects on individuals.

Moderna Inc and BioNTech SE, which worked with Pfizer Inc to develop its vaccine, are scrambling to test their shots against the variant, but expressed confidence in them.

“Scientifically it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine can also deal with this virus variant,” BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin told reporters.

More than 600,000 Americans, mostly healthcare workers, had received their first COVID-19 vaccine doses as of Monday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some states began vaccinating long-term care facility residents on Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert who received the Moderna vaccine on camera on Tuesday, said surveillance is necessary to monitor spread of the British variant, but that officials should not overreact.

“Travel bans are really rather draconian things to do,” Fauci told ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”

Along with Fauci, Azar and National Institutes of Health head Dr. Francis Collins rolled up their sleeves for the Moderna shot on live television on Tuesday.

‘EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE ON THE TABLE’

State and federal officials are strategizing how to prevent the spread of the new virus variant in the United States, considering such measures as screening passengers on flights from England or, at the federal level, mandating quarantine for travelers upon arrival.

The U.S. government is considering requiring all passengers traveling from the UK receive a negative test within 72 hours of departure as a condition of entry, airline and U.S. officials briefed on the matter said on Monday.

Michael Osterholm, a pandemic adviser for Joe Biden, on Tuesday said all options need to be considered to stem the spread of the new variant, and urged the Trump administration to come up with a plan now.

“We really need to develop a national response,” he told CNN. “Everything needs to be on the table.”

He said the U.S. could mandate a 14-day quarantine period for travelers from the UK as an added precaution beyond requiring a negative test result.

With no national plan and state and local governments already overwhelmed, it was unclear who could enact and enforce such quarantines, Osterholm said.

“Nothing will stop this virus from transmitting from country to country. Our job is to slow it down,” he added.

British Airways, Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic said on Monday they will allow only passengers who test negative for the coronavirus to fly to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee on Monday ordered travelers arriving from the UK, South Africa or other “countries with circulation of a new, potentially more contagious COVID-19 variation” to quarantine for 14 days after arriving in his state.

“This common-sense measure will protect Washingtonians in our fight against COVID-19,” Inslee said on Twitter.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Lisa Lambert, Peter Szekely, Anurag Maan and Gabriella Borter; Writing by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

No intensive care beds for most Californians as COVID-19 surges

By Sharon Bernstein

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) -There are no intensive care beds available in densely populated Southern California or the state’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley, together home to nearly 30 million people, amid a deadly surge of COVID-19, Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday.

The pandemic is crushing hospitals in the most-populous U.S. state, even as the U.S. government and two of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains began a nationwide campaign on Monday to vaccinate nursing home residents against the highly contagious respiratory disease.

The U.S. death toll from the virus has accelerated in recent weeks to 2,627 per day on a seven-day average, according to a Reuters tally.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has said U.S. COVID-19 deaths will peak in January, when its widely cited model projects that more than 100,000 people will die as the toll marches to nearly 562,000 by April 1.

Nationwide, the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients on Monday stood at nearly 113,400, near a record high of over 114,200 set on Friday, according to a Reuters tally.

In California, Newsom told a remote news conference he had requested help from nurses, doctors and medical technicians in the U.S. military, and is hoping that 200 people can be deployed. The state has also sent nearly 700 additional medical staff to beleaguered hospitals, and opened up clinics in unused state buildings, a closed sports arena and other locations.

California Secretary of Health and Human Services Mark Ghaly said many hospitals in the state may also soon run out of room for patients who need to be admitted but do not require intensive care.

Ghaly told the news conference the current surge was related to gatherings that took place over the Thanksgiving holiday and that a similar surge is expected after Christmas and New Year’s, he said.

Newsom pleaded with Californians to comply with stay-at-home orders that restrict activity in most but not all of the state. “We are not victims of fate,” he said.

The governor added that the strain of the virus ravaging California was not the new, highly contagious version emerging in the UK, Newsom said.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Peter Cooney)

U.S. CDC reports 316,844 deaths from coronavirus

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday reported 17,790,376 cases of new coronavirus, an increase of 197,616 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 1,584 to 316,844.

The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4 p.m. ET on Dec. 20 versus its previous report a day earlier.

The CDC figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

(Reporting by Trisha Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)

WHO says no need for major alarm over new coronavirus strain

By Emma Farge and Michael Shields

GENEVA/ZURICH (Reuters) – The World Health Organization cautioned against major alarm over a new, highly infectious variant of the coronavirus that has emerged in Britain, saying this was a normal part of a pandemic’s evolution.

WHO officials even put a positive light on the discovery of the new strains that prompted a slew of alarmed countries to impose travel restrictions on Britain and South Africa, saying new tools to track the virus were working.

“We have to find a balance. It’s very important to have transparency, it’s very important to tell the public the way it is, but it’s also important to get across that this is a normal part of virus evolution,” WHO emergencies chief Mike Ryan told an online briefing.

“Being able to track a virus this closely, this carefully, this scientifically in real time is a real positive development for global public health, and the countries doing this type of surveillance should be commended.”

Citing data from Britain, WHO officials said they had no evidence that the variant made people sicker or was more deadly than existing strains of COVID-19, although it did seem to spread more easily.

Countries imposing travel curbs were acting out of an abundance of caution while they assess risks, Ryan said, adding: “That is prudent. But it is also important that everyone recognizes that this happens, these variants occur.”

WHO officials said coronavirus mutations had so far been much slower than with influenza and that even the new UK variant remained much less transmissible than other diseases like mumps.

They said vaccines developed to combat COVID-19 should handle the new variants as well, although checks were under way to ensure this was the case.

“So far, even though we have seen a number of changes, a number of mutations, none has made a significant impact on either the susceptibility of the virus to any of the currently used therapeutics, drugs or the vaccines under development and one hopes that will continue to be the case,” WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan told the briefing.

The WHO said it expects to get more detail within days or weeks on the potential impact of the highly transmissible new coronavirus strain.

(Reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva and Michael Shields in Zurich; Writing by Josephine Mason; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Canada’s most populous province makes clear ‘hard lockdown’ needed to fight COVID-19

TORONTO (Reuters) – Health officials in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, on Monday said their ability to control a second wave of COVID-19 was precarious and made clear a “hard lockdown” of four to six weeks was needed.

They made the remarks to reporters just hours before Ontario premier Doug Ford was due to unveil what local media say will be a range of restrictions lasting for a month. These include a shutdown of many non-essential businesses and gyms and limiting bars and restaurants to take out service.

The province announced 2,123 new cases on Monday, the seventh consecutive day the number has exceeded 2,000.

“Our ability to control case growth is still precarious,” said Adalsteinn Brown, co-chair of Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory team.

“Based on experience in France and Australia, ‘hard lockdowns’ of 4–6 weeks can reduce case numbers in Ontario to less than 1,000 per day,” he said in a presentation to media.

Other jurisdictions, he added, were six weeks to three months ahead of Ontario and most have used some form of hard lockdown, he added.

The Ontario Hospital Association last week said the health care system could hit breaking point unless people started listening to calls to restrict gatherings.

Around 300 people are in intensive care units but this could jump to 1,500 in mid-January, Brown said.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton, writing by David Ljunggren; Editing by Alistair Bell)

U.S. asked to prioritize frontline essential workers as distribution of Moderna shots begins

By Rajesh Kumar Singh and Carl O’Donnell

(Reuters) – An advisory panel on Sunday recommended U.S. frontline essential workers and people 75 and older should be next in line to get inoculated as the distribution of Moderna Inc’s vaccine, the second approved coronavirus vaccine, began across the country.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 13 to 1 to recommend 30 million frontline essential workers, which include first responders, teachers, food and agriculture, manufacturing, U.S. Postal Service, public transit, and grocery store workers, have the next priority for the vaccines.

In all, the move would make 51 million people eligible to get inoculated in the next round. It was not immediately clear when the next round would begin.

About 200 million people including non-frontline workers such as those in media, finance, energy and IT and communication industries, persons in the 65-74 age group, and those aged 16-64 years with high-risk conditions should be in the ensuing round, the panel recommended.

States, which are the ones distributing shots to their residents, will use the advisory panel’s guidelines to decide on how to allocate the vaccines while supplies are scarce.

Inoculation against the disease is key to safely reopening large parts of the economy and reducing the risks of illness at crowded meatpacking plants, factories and warehouses. However, confusion has broken out over who exactly is considered essential during a pandemic.

Ahead of the vote, many companies and industry groups had been lobbying to get their U.S. workers in line to receive the vaccines immediately after healthcare professionals and long-term care facility residents.

Meanwhile, trucks of FedEx Corp and United Parcel Service Inc started picking up the doses from warehouses for deliveries to hospitals and other sites.

Vials of Moderna’s vaccine were filled in pharmaceutical services provider Catalent Inc’s facility in Bloomington, Indiana. Distributor McKesson Corp is shipping doses from facilities in places including Louisville, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee – close to air hubs for UPS and FedEx.

Both FedEx and UPS said the shipments were running smoothly and everything was going exactly as planned.

Separately, U.S. health officials are monitoring the new strain of COVID-19 emerging in the United Kingdom, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Sunday, adding that any mutation shows people must keep protecting themselves from the novel coronavirus while awaiting vaccination.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and scientists announced on Saturday that the new virus strain had led to spiraling infection numbers, tightening the COVID-19 restrictions for London and nearby areas and disrupting the Christmas holiday plans of millions of people.

The variant, which officials say is up to 70% more transmissible than the original, has prompted concerns about a wider spread. Several European countries, including Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, said they were taking measures to prevent people arriving from Britain, including bans on flights and trains.

The distribution of Moderna’s vaccine to more than 3,700 locations in the United States will vastly widen the rollout started last week by Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE.

U.S. COVID-19 vaccine program head Moncef Slaoui said it was most likely the first Moderna vaccine shot, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, would be given on Monday morning.

“We look forward to the vaccine. It’s going to be slightly easier to distribute because it doesn’t require as low (a) temperature as Pfizer,” Slaoui said on CNN.

The U.S. government plans to deliver 5.9 million Moderna shots and 2 million Pfizer shots this week.

Data from CDC shows 2.84 million doses have been distributed and 556,208 shots administered thus far.

The start of delivery for the Moderna vaccine will significantly widen availability of COVID-19 vaccines as U.S. deaths caused by the respiratory disease have reached more than 316,000 in the 11 months since the first documented U.S. cases.

Some states are choosing to use Moderna’s shots for harder-to-reach rural areas because they can be stored for 30 days in standard-temperature refrigerators. Pfizer’s must be shipped and stored at minus 70 Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit) and can be held for only five days at standard refrigerator temperatures.

Initial doses were given to health professionals. Programs by pharmacies Walgreens and CVS to distribute the Pfizer vaccine to long-term care facilities are expected to start on Monday.

(Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh in Chicago and Carl O’Donnell in New York; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Sonya Hepinstall and Daniel Wallis)

COVID-19 surge pushes U.S. hospitals to brink as 2nd vaccine nears approval

By Susan Heavey and Sharon Bernstein

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An unrelenting U.S. coronavirus surge pushed besieged hospitals further to the brink as the United States pressed on with its immunization rollout on Thursday and prepared to ship nearly 6 million doses of a new vaccine on the cusp of winning regulatory approval.

COVID-19 hospitalizations rose to record heights for a 19th straight day, with nearly 113,000 coronavirus patients counted in U.S. medical facilities nationwide on Wednesday, while 3,580 more perished, the most yet in a single day.

The virus has claimed over 311,000 lives in the United States to date, and health experts have warned of a deepening crisis this winter as intensive care units (ICUs) fill up and hospital beds spill over into hallways.

“We expect to have more dead bodies than we have spaces for them,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a briefing on Thursday, adding that the country’s second-largest city had fully exhausted its ICU capacity.

The number of U.S. cases rose by at least 239,018 on Thursday, according to a Reuters tally, the highest one-day increase since the pandemic began, driving the number of known infections nationally to more than 17 million.

The tolls mounted as U.S. regulators weighed whether to grant emergency use authorization for a vaccine developed by Moderna Inc, just a week after an earlier vaccine from Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE won consent for mass distribution.

A panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration overwhelmingly endorsed Moderna’s vaccine candidate for emergency use after a daylong meeting on Thursday. FDA authorization could come as soon as Friday.

Both vaccines require two doses, given three or four weeks apart, for each person inoculated.

The initial 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine began shipping on Sunday and were still making their way to hospitals across the country and into the arms of doctors, nurses, and other frontline medical professionals.

Some of the first shots were also going to residents and staff of long-term care facilities. Other essential workers, senior citizens and people with chronic health conditions will be next on the list.

BEDS IN CORRIDORS

It will take several months before vaccines are widely available to the public on demand, and opinion polls have found many Americans are hesitant about getting inoculated.

Some are distrustful of immunizations in general, and some are wary of the unprecedented speed with which the first vaccines were developed and rolled out – 11 months from the first documented U.S. cases of COVID-19.

Health authorities have sought to reassure Americans that large-scale clinical trials and rigorous scientific review found the vaccines to be safe as well as highly effective at preventing illness.

Those messages have been combined with urgent pleas for Americans to remain diligent about social distancing and mask-wearing until immunizations become widely available.

Data shows infections continuing to spread virtually unabated across much of the country, apparently fueled by increased transmissions of the virus as many Americans disregarded warnings to avoid social gatherings and unnecessary travel over the Thanksgiving holiday last month.

California has been hit particularly hard in recent weeks, with many of its hospitals reporting ICUs at or near capacity, a dire situation that triggered a renewal of sweeping stay-at-home orders across much of the state.

“Hospitals and healthcare workers continue to be stretched to the limit, as we continue to surge beyond even what we anticipated. And we’re not even through the holidays yet,” said Adam Blackstone, a spokesman for the Hospital Association of Southern California.

In San Bernardino County, where available ICU space was down to zero, newly admitted patients at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center were lined up in beds in corridors waiting for care, spokeswoman Justine Rodriguez told Reuters.

With the strain taking a growing toll on medical staff, the race to expand vaccinations is seen as critical to preventing a collapse of healthcare systems.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told CNBC on Thursday that 5.9 million Moderna vaccine doses had been allotted for state governments to receive and were ready to distribute nationwide starting at the weekend.

The Moderna vaccine has less onerous cold storage requirements than the Pfizer/BioNTech shot, making it a better option for remote and rural areas.

Nevertheless, ambivalence over the vaccine has emerged even among pockets of healthcare workers designated as first in line for inoculation.

“Some are on the fence. Some feel that we need to get it done. It’s split down the middle,” Diego Montes Lopez, 28, a phlebotomist at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South Los Angeles, said of co-workers after getting injected himself.

But Dr. Simon Mates, an ICU co-medical director at Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles, said the physicians and nurses he knows view the vaccine as having arrived at a crucial moment.

“Our biggest concern was: ‘What if one of us gets sick?’ But now with the vaccine, that concern seems to be ebbing,” said Mates, who learned Wednesday that he had already received the vaccine, rather than a placebo, as a participant in the Pfizer trials. “It’s one less thing to worry about.”

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Sharon Bernstein, Dan Whitcomb, Manas Mishra, Peter Szekely, Richard Cowan, Susan Cornwell, Lucy Nicholson and Anurag Maan; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Steve Gorman; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Bill Berkrot, Grant McCool and Richard Pullin)

Israel to halt sweeping COVID-19 cellphone surveillance next month

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel will next month halt its cellphone tracking of coronavirus cases except for carriers who refuse epidemiological questioning or in the event of a surge in contagions, a government ministry said.

Used on and off since March in efforts to curb COVID-19, the Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency’s surveillance technology checks confirmed carriers’ locations against other cellphones nearby to determine with whom they came into contact.

The method has faced challenges in courts and parliament because of privacy concerns and questions about its efficacy. Some Israelis avoid using listed cellphones in public in the hope of not being contact-traced and ordered into quarantine.

A cabinet panel that reviewed the tracking decided it would not be extended beyond Jan. 20, when a law allowing its use expires, the Intelligence Ministry said.

“The tool will serve as a safety net, to be applied regarding coronavirus carriers who do not cooperate with the epidemiological investigation and in the event of a significant rise in morbidity,” it said in a statement.

The surveillance alone had accounted for 7% of case detections in Israel, with questioning by Health Ministry investigators accounting for the rest, it said.

Israel, which has a population of 9 million, has reported 365,042 coronavirus cases and 3,034 deaths. After two national lockdowns, the country may soon reimpose curbs on towns where contagions are resurgent, officials said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will on Saturday be the first person in Israel to receive the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech, shipments of which began arriving last week.

Officials say Israel will have enough vaccines by the end of this year for the most vulnerable people and predict a return to relative normalcy by March. Polls found that some two-thirds of Israelis want to be vaccinated.

(Writing by Dan Williams, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Narrow hallways pose higher infection risk; hospitalized COVID-19 patients often need readmission

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Narrow hallways present higher infection risks

An unmasked coronavirus-infected person walking fast down a narrow corridor leaves a long stream of virus-laden droplets trailing behind, a new computer simulation suggests. Even if social distancing guidelines are followed, it might still be risky to follow someone down a narrow corridor, researchers advised in a report published on Tuesday in Physics of Fluids. “The transmission of COVID-19 is highly influenced by the airflow,” said coauthor Xiaolei Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “A slight change of airflow can significantly alter the virus spreading pattern,” he said. Such changes can be caused by a minor difference in corridor width, walking speed, indoor architectural structure, temperature, humidity or other factors. Staying six feet (1.83 m) behind the person in front of you “is not enough for narrow corridors, and wearing a face mask is recommended even if you do not see people around, he said. In addition, the viral droplets behind a walking person tend to hover at the waist height, so short kids are exposed to higher risk than adults, he added. “When you are with a child, you may want to hold him or her in your arms.”

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients often need readmission

Soon after leaving the hospital, COVID-19 survivors are at higher risk for requiring readmission or dying than survivors of other high-risk medical conditions, new data suggest. Researchers studied patients admitted to 132 U.S. Veterans Affairs hospitals across the country from March through May, including 2,179 admitted for COVID-19. Another 1,799 had pneumonia unrelated to COVID-19 and 3,505 had heart failure, conditions associated with high readmission rates. Within 10 days after discharge, roughly 14% of COVID-19 patients had been readmitted or died, compared to roughly 10% of the other patients, researchers reported on Monday in JAMA. By day 60 after discharge, roughly one in four COVID-19 patients had been readmitted or died, but the rate was slightly higher among the other patients. “Recovery can be a bumpy road,” coauthor Dr. Hallie Prescott of University of Michigan Health System told Reuters. But a lot has changed since June, she added. “We have better treatments so it’s possible … we will see fewer cases where patients have late worsening of symptoms requiring readmission.”

U.S. Black communities missing out on COVID-19 testing

COVID-19 testing is essential for identification and isolation of infected people, but testing may be less common among U.S. Blacks than among whites, a Missouri study suggests. Between March and September, nearly one million COVID-19 tests were conducted in the St. Louis and Kansas City regions. In the first three months of that period, areas (identified by postal zip codes) with higher proportions of residents who were Black, without insurance, and with lower median incomes accounted for 25% of COVID-19 cases but only 9% to 12% of the tests performed for the virus, researchers found. “Even within the same zip codes, testing rates were lower among Black residents compared to white residents,” said Dr. Aaloke Mody of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The disparities persisted through the summer, he said. “Studies have repeatedly shown greater burden of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and mortality in minority communities,” Mody and colleagues wrote on Monday in Clinical Infectious Diseases. “Testing disparities may be important driver of disparities in disease burden,” Mody said. “We need proactive public health strategies that really help to ensure equitable testing, such as making community-based testing widely available. This can also be extended to thinking about equity in vaccine distribution,” he said.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Linda Carroll; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

“Lock down,” says Italy adviser, as deaths head for wartime levels

By Reuters Staff

ROME (Reuters) – An adviser to Italy’s health ministry has called for coronavirus restrictions to be drastically tightened to avoid a “national tragedy” after the national statistics bureau ISTAT said deaths this year would be the highest since World War Two.

“We are in a war situation, people don’t realize it but the last time we had this many deaths, bombs were dropping on our cities during the war,” public health professor Walter Ricciardi told the television channel la7 on Tuesday evening.

Ricciardi, the adviser to Health Minister Roberto Speranza, said the government, which is considering tightening restrictions over the Christmas and New Year holidays, should lock down the main cities completely.

In an interview with Wednesday’s daily La Stampa, he said Rome had been “constantly late” in responding to the second, autumn wave of the virus.

Italy reported 846 COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday, taking the official total to 65,857, the fifth highest in the world.

As in many other countries, that total is widely considered to be an underestimate because many people who died of COVID-19 during the first wave were never tested for the virus.

ISTAT head Gian Carlo Blangiardo said on Tuesday that the overall number of deaths in Italy this year would exceed 700,000, against 647,000 in 2019.

“The last time something like this happened was in 1944 when we were at the height of the Second World War,” he told RAI state television.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Tuesday urged Italians to avoid “irresponsible” gatherings over the holidays and said the government might make some “small adjustments” to its current restrictions.

But Ricciardi told La Stampa this was not enough:

“The Netherlands has locked down with half our deaths, Germany has locked down with a third of them – I don’t understand this hesitation. If we don’t take adequate measures, we are heading for a national tragedy.”