Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte attends the informative debate about further initiatives adopted by the Italian government
Credit: Getty
Coronavirus Article Bar with counter
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has signed an emergency decree that will divide Italy into three risk areas and impose a 10pm curfew to curb rising Covid-19 deaths, hospitalisations and infections.
News that the PM had finally signed the controversial "lockdown light" decree came after midnight early on Wednesday, just as US election results were dominating the news cycle.
The full text of the decree, which he told parliament this week was necessary to control contagion but not so severe as to paralyse the country, is set to be officially published on Wednesday morning, and go into effect on Thursday through to December 3.
According to the draft of the decree published by Italian news agencies, a nationwide curfew will prohibit movement between the hours of 10pm and 5am and shopping centres and mega stores are to be closed on weekends. Museums, exhibitions and betting and bingo halls will also be closed.
Primary school will continue face-to-face but children over age six will be required to wear masks in school in high-risk areas. Secondary schools will be mostly online and public transport capacity reduced to 50 per cent.
The new decree introduces a new three-tiered risk system that puts regions of Italy into either green (lowest risk level) orange (elevated risk level) or red (highest risk level) zones with differentiated rules and restrictions for each phase.
The Health Ministry will be in charge of issuing ordinances that determine which regions are in which risk area, based on 21 scientific and social parameters such as the R-rate contagiousness index and the number of available hospital beds and personnel in each region. Health ministry advisors will also decide when a region is in the condition to move to a different phase.
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Stefano Bonaccini, President of the Conference of the Regions and Autonomous Provinces and centre-left president of the Emilia-Romagna region, said in a signed letter that the regions had “strong perplexities and concerns” about measures that undermined their role and tasks with choices and decisions made on the basis of evaluations by technical bodies.
Though no ordinances have yet been issued, the Italian daily Repubblica reported that Lombardy, Piedmont, Calabria, Alto Adige and Valle d’Aosta could be the first regions to fall into the critical red zone category, where the closures will be similar to the rigid lockdown Italians endured last spring.
Travel will be banned in and out of red zone regions, which will also have internal travel restrictions that prohibit leaving one’s residential municipality except for work, study or health reasons. Stores and markets (excluding food and groceries) as well as most non-essential services will also be closed in the red zones. Unlike last spring’s lockdown, however, hairdressers will stay open, even in high-risk areas.
Italy’s R-rate contagiousness index is now at 1.7 with 150 contagions per 100,000 inhabitants.
On Tuesday the country registered 28,244 new infections, down from a previous high last week, but 353 deaths, the highest daily toll since May 2.
Though the majority of infections are asymptomatic and only 21 per cent of the country’s ICU beds are currently occupied, intensive care facilities could be at risk of capacity in 15 regions within a month, Mr Conte told parliament on Monday.
Italy, the first European country to be hit hard by the virus, has recorded more than 39,000 deaths since the outbreak emerged in late February, the second-highest toll in the continent after Britain.
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