For the Bergamo prosecutor's office there were over 100 suspected coronavirus cases between December and January

The prosecutor's investigation follows the track of admissions for pneumonia considered "abnormal" months before the official outbreak of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy

(Photo by Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / picture alliance via Getty Images) During the investigation conducted by the Bergamo prosecutor's office on the failure to establish the red zone in Val Seriana, one of the areas most affected by Covid-19 in Italy, it emerged that already in December 2019, in the hospital of Alzano, they had been hospitalized well 40 patients infected with a virus still not recognized. Cases that, due to their characteristics, could be traced back to Sars CoV-2. Investigators coordinated by prosecutor Maria Cristina Rota listened to doctors, nurses, health workers, pharmacists and other technical staff and, crossing the data, found that dozens of suspected pneumonia had been recorded in the area, which was impossible at the time of diagnosis, locate the pathogen. The cases, from the end of the year until January 2020, have reached about 110.

The reconstruction of the investigators

The investigative hypothesis started from the testimonies of some pharmacists from Alzano who sold massively drugs for "abnormal" or "atypical" pneumonia, upon prescription from general practitioners. At the end of February, these medicines, later included in the pharmacological protocol of the coronavirus, were practically impossible to find. In the failure to identify these cases and, above all, in their lack of isolation, two factors weighed substantially.

The first depends on the fact that, at the end of the year, the epidemic was still restricted in China, and there were still cases in Europe. The second is instead related to the guidelines laid down by the government in the initial phase of the infection in Italy: these are two protocols of 22 and 27 January, which asked, respectively, to report a person who has manifested a clinical picture unusual or suspicious (for example a sudden deterioration, after you have received care), and, later, to consider among these, only those who had been in the city of Wuhan and in Hubei province in China, “in the 14 days prior to the onset of symptoms” or those that had visited or worked in a market of live animals in Wuhan and/or in the province of Hubei” .

the Guidelines, which, however, remained in force until February 23, when it was discovered the patient 1 of Codogno. As he writes the Republic , from the data provided by Ats Bergamo and Asst Bergamo East shows that, by the end of December, there was a spike of pneumonia that can't be classified. The circumstance that it was known both to the technical personnel in health care, the Ats and the Lombardy Region, but that no one has ever checked in more detail and also when you began to speak of the virus in Italy. All the elements that have contributed to the serious situation of February in the Bergamo area, with hundreds of victims and positive.