Italy’s coronavirus outbreak ‘could have happened anywhere’

European health officials sought to tamp down the blame game in Italy.

European health authorities are playing down the idea that Italy did anything wrong amid domestic finger-pointing about the country’s coronavirus outbreak.

Italy has the continent’s worst cluster of COVID-19 cases. As of midday Wednesday, 374 people have been diagnosed, with the death toll up to 12. The government has banned the export of personal protective equipment without prior authorization from the civil protection department.

“It could have happened anywhere,” said Andrea Ammon, chief of the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, whose experts are on the ground in Italy studying the outbreak.

“Our assessment is that we will likely see similar situations in other countries in Europe,” she said during a press conference Wednesday with top officials from the European Commission and World Health Organization.

As commerce in Italy’s northern regions shuts down, politicians have been sniping at one another over the response. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, for example, accused a hospital in Lombardy of dropping the ball on protocol and suggested earlier this week that the authority of Italian regions to run their own health systems should be revoked.

“We should not indulge in any blame game here,” said Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza at the Wednesday press conference. He stressed the need for regions to coordinate.

That coordination also needs to happen among EU member countries, said European Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides. She called the coronavirus outbreak a “test case” for emergency response globally and for “our cooperation within the EU.”

On Tuesday, national health ministers from countries around Italy coalesced around the need for a common response to the outbreak. According to a set of conclusions viewed by POLITICO, they agreed that closing borders would be “a disproportionate and ineffective measure at this time.”

They also agreed “in general not to cancel a priori major events” but rather on a case-by-case basis. Furthermore, the ministers called for standardized information to be provided to professionals and the public, “including possible common information at the borders.”

As a follow-up to the Tuesday meeting, Kyriakides said on Wednesday that the Commission will draw up “model information for travelers coming back from risk areas or traveling to them.”

Meanwhile, France confirmed on Wednesday the first death of a French national. Greece confirmed its first infection case, a 38-year-old Greek woman returning from Northern Italy. The number of confirmed cases also went up by a few in Spain, Germany and France.

However, at the Rome press conference, the head of the WHO’s European Region, Hans Kluge, said there’s “no need for panic.”

Kluge noted that four out of five cases result in mild symptoms at most. Only about five percent of cases require serious treatment, like ventilation to support breathing — and only 1 or 2 percent of those infected die of the disease, mostly people over 65 with weakened immune systems.

Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli and Carmen Paun contributed reporting.

This article has been updated.

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