Young people stoke the third coronavirus wave in Italy

Young people are suddenly ‘suffering a lot more’, a senior doctor says, as intensive care wards approach record occupancy.

A health worker with a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit of the Bolognini hospital in Seriate, Bergamo, in Italy. Picture: AFP

Young patients with the UK COVID-19 variant are driving Italy’s third wave, a senior doctor has claimed as intensive care wards approach record occupancy.

“They are the new element in this third wave,” said Massimo Andreoni, scientific director of the Italian society of infectious and tropical diseases.

“They may have got infected in the first and second waves but now, for some reason, they are.”

Italy has 3700 Covid sufferers in intensive care, close to the peak of 4063 reached at the height of Italy’s first wave a year ago, and enough to take up 40 per cent of beds, well above the safety limit of 30 per cent set by the government. In Rome there are more intensive care COVID-19 patients — 370 — than at any time last year.

Police traffic officer Cristina Corbucci in Rome. Picture: AFP

The average age of new cases rose to the late sixties in April last year but the average age is now in the mid-forties. The average age of intensive care patients has dropped from the mid to late seventies to the late sixties.

“The drop in age could be linked to the elderly getting vaccinated, but only partly because there is a rise in the absolute number of younger patients,” Andreoni said.

“It is possible that the now-dominant UK variant not only spreads faster but is more aggressive.”

With new daily cases steady at about 20,000, Italy’s death toll has reached 108,000, second in Europe after the UK as Rome scrambles to organise its vaccination campaign.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi has ordered a shutdown at Easter and cafes and restaurants look likely to remain closed beyond the holiday, prompting hundreds of owners to promise to defy the rules and reopen.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in Rome. Picture: AFP

Despite joining Draghi’s government, the hard right Northern League party leader Matteo Salvini has been whipping up opposition to the restrictions. “Closing Italy for the whole of April is unthinkable,” he said.

Andreoni said: “Italy’s contagion rate is stabilising because of the restrictions. If we reopen Covid will surge back in two weeks. We must not let it bounce back while we bring in mass vaccinations.”

Italy has given 9.5 million jabs and aims to speed up as more are delivered. Lobby groups have been accused of jumping the queue. They include lawyers in Tuscany who have been inoculated before the elderly and magistrates have threatened to halt court hearings unless they were vaccinated quickly.

Passengers stay 1m away from each other as they wait to take an early train at Rome's Termini railway station. Picture: AFP

Bernarbo Bocca, head of the hoteliers’ association, was furious that Italians could fly to European destinations for Easter but were forbidden from travelling between regions in Italy to reach a hotel. “You can’t move within Italy but you can go and spend your money abroad, risking contagion,” he said.

Good news came from Vo’, one of the first Italian towns to be hit by Covid last February, where research shows that locals who were infected at the time had effective antibodies 10 months later.

“What is unusual is that some of those people who were in contact with sufferers during the second wave didn’t have symptoms but saw their antibody count rise as a result,” said Andrea Crisanti, the University of Padua microbiologist running the tests.

The findings suggest the people had a short, harmless minor contagion, which allowed them to build their antibody count even higher, he said.

The Times