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FEATURE

‘A disaster’: Italy scrambles to tackle vaccine delays

Italian health services are under pressure to speed up Covid-19 vaccinations amid reports of faulty booking systems in northern Italy failing to notify people of their appointments.

Published: 22 March 2021 13:55 CET
Updated: 22 March 2021 17:05 CET
'A disaster': Italy scrambles to tackle vaccine delays
People wait outside a Covid-19 vaccination centre in Rome. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

The vaccine rollout in Italy’s hardest-hit region of Lombardy has been badly hampered by problems with booking systems, with at least one injection centre nearly empty at the weekend.

It’s been “a disaster, since the start,” the mayor of Crema city, Stefania Bonaldi, told the La Repubblica newspaper. “There is a bug in the system that needs fixing.”

READ ALSO: The essential Italian you need to get tested or vaccinated for Covid-19

A vaccination centre in the provincial capital Cremona was nearly empty over the weekend after people were not informed of their vaccine appointments.

Local officials scrambled to inform locals by calling them manually after looking up phone numbers in the civil registry, and one mayor borrowed a minivan to pick up the elderly from their homes, La Repubblica reported.

Similar problems were reported in the Como and Brianza provinces.

Lombardy’s health minister Letizia Moratti pledged to take “quick and drastic decisions” to address the “unacceptable” situation. Regional president Attilio Fontana said he had asked the board of Aria, the regionally-owned company that manages vaccination bookings, to resign over the fiasco.

The region plans to switch its booking system to a platform developed by the Italian Post Office and already in use in other parts of the country.

Italy has reported vaccine delays across the country, a situation aggravated by the medicine agency’s decision to halt injections of the AstraZeneca vaccine for several days last week until EU regulators re-confirmed it was “safe and effective”. 

READ ALSO:

To date Italy has administered 7.8 million doses and fully vaccinated just under 2.5 million people — around 4.1 percent of a total population of 60 million.

There have also been major discrepancies across the country in terms of vaccinating the elderly, in part due to the fact that each region controls its own health service and can set its own vaccination schedule.

The percentage of people over 80 who have been fully vaccinated ranges from 36.5 percent in South Tyrol to 2.6 percent in Sardinia, according to the GIMBE independent health think.

A temporary vaccination hub in Rome. Photo: Tiziana Fabi / AFP

Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who took office last month promising to use “all means” to fight the pandemic, has pledged a massive scale-up of vaccinations.

Speaking last week, he admitted that “regions are going all over the place [with vaccinations] and this is not good, not good”.

The government has set a target to triple vaccinations to 500,000 per day by mid-April, and to fully vaccinate 80 percent of the population by mid-September.

Yet Italy is only forecast to deliver 200,000 shots a day this week after a delivery of AstraZeneca vaccine scheduled for last week was cancelled when injections were paused. The extra doses will now be delivered in the coming days.

The health ministry promised to “double” the number of AstraZeneca shots after the suspension was lifted, having cost Italy around 200,000 vaccinations over four days.

It says jabs will be carried out in pharmacies and doctors’ offices to help speed up the process, though the biggest obstacle remains the shortage of doses.

Member comments

  1. Italy is so bob-on with its computer system associated with motoring. A parking fine, a speeding fine, taxation… whatever, are delivered pretty quickly. Similarly with its community tax, water and refuse. So why the big problem with vaccination? Is it just a health issue?

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HEALTH

Covid-19 still causing 1,000 deaths a week in Europe, WHO warns

The World Health Organization's European office warned on Tuesday the risk of Covid-19 has not gone away, saying it was still responsible for nearly 1,000 deaths a week in the region. And the real figure may be much higher.

Published: 27 June 2023 13:27 CEST
Covid-19 still causing 1,000 deaths a week in Europe, WHO warns

The global health body on May 5 announced that the Covid-19 pandemic was no longer deemed a “global health emergency.”

“Whilst it may not be a global public health emergency, however, Covid-19 has not gone away,” WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge told reporters.

The WHO’s European region comprises 53 countries, including several in central Asia.

“Close to 1,000 new Covid-19 deaths continue to occur across the region every week, and this is an underestimate due to a drop in countries regularly reporting Covid-19 deaths to WHO,” Kluge added, and urged authorities to ensure vaccination coverage of at least 70 percent for vulnerable groups.

Kluge also said estimates showed that one in 30, or some 36 million people, in the region had experienced so called “long Covid” in the last three years, which “remains a complex condition we still know very little about.”

“Unless we develop comprehensive diagnostics and treatment for long Covid, we will never truly recover from the pandemic,” Kluge said, encouraging more research in the area which he called an under-recognised condition.

Most countries in Europe have dropped all Covid safety restrictions but some face mask rules remain in place in certain countries in places like hospitals.

Although Spain announced this week that face masks will no longer be required in certain healthcare settings, including hospitals and pharmacies, with a couple of exceptions.

Sweden will from July 1st remove some of its remaining Covid recommendations for the public, including advice to stay home and avoid close contact with others if you’re ill or have Covid symptoms.

The health body also urged vigilance in the face of a resurgence of mpox, having recorded 22 new cases across the region in May, and the health impact of heat waves.

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