ROME (AP) – Police in Italy have imposed new COVID-19 travel restrictions to limit Christmas gatherings with distant relatives as public health officials on Thursday called for a “drastic reduction” in socializing to prevent new infections during the holidays.
An amended nationwide lockdown took effect on Christmas Eve with restrictions and closures similar to the 10 weeks of hard lockdown the Italian government enforced from March to May, when Italy became the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in Europe.
The goal of the December 24-Jan. According to official counts, the January delay should prevent a January resurgence after the fall wave of coronavirus infections in Italy killed more people than it did during the country’s first spring outbreak. The total number of confirmed cases in Italy passed the 2 million mark on Thursday, while 505 more deaths brought the country’s official toll in the pandemic to 70,900, the highest number in Europe.
Despite the new restrictions, Italians lined up at bakeries, fish markets and supermarkets to shop last minute to prepare their Christmas Eve dinners, traditionally multi-generational multi-course that are a holiday chapter of Italian family life.
Italy, which has been under local restrictions since the beginning of November, has since slowly seen an exponential increase in the number of infections. But the latest weekly health ministry monitoring report released Thursday suggested the downtrend was stagnating.
The ministry warned that hospitals were still at risk of becoming overwhelmed, calling for “a drastic reduction in physical interaction” between people outside the immediate family. The government urged Italians to limit their Christmas Eve ‘cenone’ dinners to no more than two people who do not share the same household.
“It seems banal and you may ask ‘Why are there only two people outside the nuclear family?'”, Acknowledged Dr. Giovanni Rezza, responsible for prevention at the Italian Ministry of Health. “But it is clearly based on probability calculations: the larger the meeting, the greater the risk that one of these people, especially if he or she is from somewhere else, could become infected and therefore pose a risk to others.”
To reduce that possibility, the government has denied residents travel from region to region from Monday. Police were on site on Thursday to check if Italians on the road were abiding by rules restricting travel within their own regions.
Carabinieri Colonel Alessandro Dominici, on patrol outside the Colosseum in Rome, said sanctions range from 400 euros to 3,000 euros ($ 488- $ 3,700 and could add up for multiple violations.
Residents were also required to carry police-issued certificates explaining why they were out, with work, health care, and other necessities such as grocery shopping.
But the Christmas Eve grocery shopping turned out to be busy, as is often the case at this time of the year. Shoppers in Rome lined up outside the markets to pick up pre-ordered fish, which is the backbone of the traditional holiday meal in much of southern Italy. Bakeries did good business selling dried fruit ‘panettone’ cakes or lighter yellow ‘pandoro’ cakes sprinkled with icing sugar that are staples for Christmas desserts.
“Yesterday there were 900 people in the fish department, all stacked on top of each other,” said Daniela Tufoni, who works in a supermarket in Rome.
Tufoni said police officers arrested her on Thursday to check if she had a legitimate reason to be away. “It’s good they do these checks, but if they go to the grocery stores, I can’t tell you what they’ll find,” she said from her car. “Nobody respects the distance.”
Catholic churches delayed midnight Mass by a few hours so that congregants could meet a 10 p.m. curfew. Pope Francis planned to celebrate his Christmas vigil from 7:30 p.m. for a small group in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Non-essential shops, restaurants and bars were closed: the glass-domed Galleria shopping center in Milan was almost empty, shops along Rome’s usually busy shopping street Via del Corso were closed, and the pigeons had St. Mark’s Square in Venice to themselves.
Restaurants and stores will be given a respite next week to reopen for business before closing again for New Year’s Eve and the January 6 Epiphany holiday, which marks the end of the lockdown period.
The Italian government is particularly concerned about the continued high demand for beds in both intensive care units and regular hospital units for COVID-19 patients. At a national level, Italian hospitals remain just within the government-set benchmark of no more than 30% of IC beds and 40% of non-IC beds for virus patients.
Officials are striving to keep hospitalizations in COVID-19 below those thresholds so that patients with other medical needs can receive treatment. Regions that exceed benchmarks have been subject to stricter restrictions to reduce infections and related hospital admissions.
Italy will join the other countries of the European Union on Sunday in administering their first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, with health workers and nursing home residents being the first to receive an injection.
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AP visual journalist Luigi Navarro contributed.