While Italy's case and death figures are, like everywhere else, all-but-impossible to distinguish from background 'average' rates of winter influenza-like illnesses, something serious does seem to be going on in the region of Lombardy - and more specifically, in the province of Bergamo.
The Russian govt recently
sent a lot of military personnel and equipment to that city:
To give you an idea of how concentrated Italy’s ‘COVID-19 problem’ is in the northern region of Lombardy, these
Italian figures reported last week had ’25,500 cases of confirmed COVID-19 cases’ in Lombardy, while the next worst-affected region in all of Italy is Emilia-Romagna, south of Lombardy,
with just a over fifth of that number – 6,700 cases.
So this outbreak in Italy is centered on Lombardy, and Bergamo province specifically. Although the ‘original Lombardy cluster’ was previously believed via case-tracking to have originated in Codogno in the south of Lombardy, which is about 60km due south from Bergamo city, the highest concentration of cases/infections/deaths are in Bergamo province itself:
The media has
since reported that it's unknown exactly how and where the first cluster began in Lombardy because the ‘China connection’ turned out to be a false lead:
Bergamo then is Italy’s ‘Wuhan’, and Lombardy is its ‘Hubei Province’, by far the worst-hit region in the whole country:
Which takes me to something ‘else’ that took place in this very region of Italy earlier in the winter…
Bergamo meningitis outbreak January 2020
From late December to late January, Italian media was reporting about a meningitis outbreak in Bergamo that had
killed 5 people. The resulting panic spurred Lombardy health authorities to vaccinate some 45,000 people in early-to-mid January with the Meningococcal C vaccine, apparently all of them in one area to the east of Bergamo, between the city itself and Lago d’Iseo.
(Incidentally, this was in addition to the
185,000 doses of free flu vaccines administered to Bergamo residents this winter. I don't now how this coverage compares with populations of comparable size, but northern Italy, as widely noted, has a lot of elderly citizens.)
The authorities there reported satisfaction at having vaccinated 65% of their target population with this MenC vaccine, providing them, they assumed, with 'herd immunity' and thereby 'preventing an epidemic'.
I found almost nothing on this in English, but here are a few reports, all automatic translations from Italian news reports, so perhaps Italian-speakers can clarify any significant mistakes:
They apparently vaccinated
all schoolchildren in the target area of Bergamo:
Apparently there are 30-40 cases of meningitis in Lombardy every year:
Famous last words?
At the end of January,
Gallera was reporting:
Did they, by rolling out a mass vaccination program in Bergamo to 'contain' a not-particularly-serious 'outbreak' of meningitis, somehow compound ongoing - and, up until that point, undetected - COVID-19 cases? Did they perhaps trigger a far more dangerous outbreak altogether?