Six years after Covid, Italia is still without a pandemic plan and new intensive care

Exactly six years after the discovery in Italia of the first patient struck by the Covid pandemic on 21 February 2020 and almost three years after the WHO's declaration of the end of the emergency in May 2023, Italia's promise to be ready in the face of a new health emergency has not yet been fulfilled. The two main tools for stemming the tsunami of a new pandemic - the new pandemic plan and the upgrading of intensive care units with at least almost 6,000 additional new beds, the ones that were desperately sought in the harshest months of the Covid to treat the most serious patients - are far behind schedule: first of all, missing from the roll-call is the 2025-2029 pandemic plan announced some time ago by the Ministry of Health led by Minister Orazio Schillaci whose task it is to design the architecture of interventions and countermeasures to be taken in the event of a new health emergency.

The plan is at the centre of a long dispute between the Ministry and the Regions, in which the Ministry of the Economy has also been involved: the last draft of the plan - a document of more than 300 pages - dates back to last summer, to which was also added a letter last January from the State's General Accounting Office, which fleeced the economic coverage of the planned measures, which were not well thought out. The plan is in fact financed with significant resources from last year's budget manoeuvre, which has already allocated 50 million for 2025, 150 million for 2026, and 300 million annually from 2027. The regions that are pushing for the plan to be approved as soon as possible emphasise, among other things, how the lack of approval has led to 'a regulatory vacuum with consequent uncertainty for the planning and implementation of the measures in a uniform manner throughout the country'.

Up to here the strategies - those that had not been culpably updated on the eve of the pandemic in 2019 - because perhaps even more serious is the delay that concerns the upgrading of intensive care that had been decided the first time even in May 2020 with the relaunch decree that had planned the realisation in a short time - the ambition was in less than a year - of 7656 more intensive and sub-intensive care beds with 1.1 billion allocated. From there, from one delay to the next, the plan became part of the NRP objectives, with the bar being lowered to 5922 more beds overall as the minimum target (2,692 intensive care and 3,230 sub-intensive care beds) to be completed by June of this year. A very close deadline that jeopardises the attainment of the target, given that according to the latest data anticipated by Il Sole 24 Ore dating back to 9 February, a total of 4227 had been completed, i.e. 1695 fewer (853 in intensive care and 842 in semi-intensive care). With some regions in serious delay and others still with zero extra beds, such as Basilicata, Bolzano, Molise and Valle d'Aosta. A serious delay that was also certified by the Minister for European Affairs, the NRP, and Cohesion Policies, Tommaso Foti: "If there was another objective that had to be achieved immediately, it was that of intensive and sub-intensive care beds. We cannot compromise on this: it is a fact that qualifies us in front of the European Commission and in Europe as responsible or not, since Italia has had the highest number of Covid victims'. Then there is the problem of healthcare personnel to make these new intensive care units work: 'As of today, as in agreement with Siaarti we already foresaw at the end of 2021, the anaesthetists resuscitators needed to manage them are barely sufficient. Those envisaged by the Pnrr will only be manageable by progressively hiring new staff, which would make it possible to cope better with any future emergencies; today we are certainly in better shape than in 2020,' warns Alessandro Vergallo President of Aaroi-Emac.