© AP Photo/Riccardo De Luca
Antibody testing in Italy indicates that nearly 1.5 million people, or about 2.5% of the population, have had the coronavirus. But officials said Monday that huge geographic variations in the results confirmed a nationwide lockdown was "absolutely crucial" to preventing the country's south from getting slammed as badly as its north.
The Health Ministry and the national statistics agency based their assessment on tests performed May 25-July 15 on a sample of nearly 65,000 Italians selected for their location, age and type of work. The government carried out the testing to understand how widely the virus circulated in the first country in the West to be overwhelmed by COVID-19, given that the bulk of confirmed cases and deaths occurred in northern Italy.
The sampling indicated that 1.482 million Italians nationwide had come into contact with the virus and developed an immunological response to it,
six times more than Italy's reported number of confirmed cases, said Linda Laura Sabbadini, a director at the Italian National Institute of Statistics, or ISTAT.
But there were significant geographic disparities: An estimated
7.5% of the Lombardy region's residents had virus antibodies versus
1.9% in neighboring Veneto. Within Lombardy, sharp differences also emerged from province to province: Some
24% of Bergamo residents developed virus antibodies, but only 5.1% of residents did a few provinces over in Pavia.
Comment: Persons of reason (with acumen apparently higher than MPD) chimed in to say these were not the prevention tips they were hoping for: Bombarded with criticism across the board, the Minneapolis police think again and backpedal their statement: See also: