The Italian Minister of Health announced the extension of the restrictions imposed due to the Coronavirus epidemic until at least April 6, while the Republic of San Marino announced a national vaccination day to start administering the Russian vaccine, which has reached the mini state, MTI. Writes.
Health Minister Roberto Speranza announced in Parliament that the current restrictive measures will be maintained until Easter.
The head of the ministry stressed that it cannot be mitigated due to the strong spread of viral mutations, which are expected to reach their peak by mid-March. Due to another wave of epidemics from the northern Italian provinces, the saturation of intensive care units has already exceeded the critical threshold in five of the twenty regions. The minister added that the regional division will be preserved according to the colors indicating the degrees of risk of the epidemic.
Roberto Speranza assured that according to the original plans, Italy should receive 13.4 percent of the vaccine that reaches the European Union. However, due to the delay in delivery, vaccination is “extremely difficult”.
“We do not care about the delay, we are trying by all means to pressure the arrival of shipments,” the minister said. Roberto Speranza stressed that in the current health emergency, “the vaccine is common property available to all, so the privileged ownership of patents must be abandoned.”
By Wednesday night, 3.7 million Italians had been vaccinated, 1.3 million of them in a second dose. The number of the latter has barely increased in recent weeks.
In Lombardy, the vaccination of people over the age of 80 has begun: more than half a million have been registered, equivalent to seventy percent of the age group, and more than four thousand have been vaccinated so far. In Rome, another inoculation site has opened in a cloud-shaped conference center designed by star architect Massimiliano Foxas. District President Luca Zingaretti, Secretary-General of the left-wing Democratic Party, said they are ready to vaccinate 30,000 people a day “as soon as enough vaccine arrives.” Zingaretti indicated that pharmaceutical companies in the region are also ready to produce vaccines.
As for vaccinations, Thursday was declared an official holiday in the Republic of San Marino, where the campaign begins with twenty-five health workers. The miniature country did not receive a shipment to the European Union, so Sputnik V bought a Russian vaccine, the first 7,500 ampoules of which arrived on Tuesday. Alessandra Brochi, chief executive of the San Marino Public Health Bureau (ISS), said they want to vaccinate every resident over the age of 18. The vaccination of those over the age of 75 will begin next week, and law enforcement personnel and educators will follow. Four hundred people are scheduled to be vaccinated per day at three vaccination stations. There are currently 317 active patients in the republic totaling 34,000 patients, twenty-six are in hospitals, ten of them are in intensive care units. Seventy-three of me died from illness in the first year of the epidemic.
Alessandra Brochi indicated that a large number of them come from nearby Italian cities, where the situation is critical due to the British virus variant and there are not enough vaccines, but San Marino currently does not give the Russian vaccine only to its citizens.
The Republic’s Commissioner for Epidemiological Measures, Agostino Cecarini, said that an additional 7,500 ampoules of the Russian vaccine are expected to be obtained. He added that the European Medicines Agency did not authorize Sputnik V, but San Marino mandated an investigation into the Romanian Epidemic Hospital, which considered the Russian vaccine effective.
