Covid gate and Bonaccini’s anger. And the case reaches Parliament – ​​

Rita Cavallaro

03 April 2024

Governor Stefano Bonaccini’s Covid wasteland ends up in Parliament. ‘s investigation has opened Pandora’s box on the management of the pandemic in Emilia Romagna and the chaos in the emergency room of the Maggiore hospital in Parma, due to delays in swabs. And now Fratelli d’Italia senator Marco Lisei, who was a regional councilor at the time of the emergency, has announced that he will present a parliamentary question to the government to ask for clarity on the health choices of the Bonaccini council, including the exclusion of the Laboratory of Microbiology and Virology from the network of regional diagnostic centers for swab processing. “What is emerging is absolutely serious,” explains the senator. «Already at the time I remember that in the Legislative Assembly we highlighted the critical issues that existed regarding the delay in the processing of swabs. It was a period in which we did not receive any answers to our questions and access to documents”, he underlines, “so much so that I was forced to file a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office for these lack of answers. Then they began, albeit belatedly, to arrive. For this reason today, in light of what is emerging, we believe it is necessary for the Ministry to tell us whether the then minister Roberto Speranza granted an exemption to the Emilia Romagna Region with respect to the ministerial circular and, if so, why the Region was allowed to to act in this way. If there was no exemption”, concludes the parliamentarian, “the assumption of responsibility lies entirely with the Region, otherwise it would be another of the sensational errors of the Conte Government’s pandemic management”.

Meanwhile, instead of responding on the merits, governor Bonaccini yesterday preferred to make a polemical tweet which does not help to clarify anything. Perhaps because, as some people close to him say, he would be furious at having discovered the details of the investigation in the pages of . And while any errors by the executive led by the president of the Democratic Party will be the subject of investigations by the Covid parliamentary commission of inquiry, what happened in the Parma University Hospital is being examined by the Prosecutor’s Office, which has opened an investigation started by a complaint from March 2020 from the Virology department which then sparked a dispute between the same laboratory and the healthcare company. This was followed by other exposures and recent seizures of swab reports and test tubes by the Nas. Under the spotlight is what happened in the second hospital in Emilia, the Maggiore, where the director general Massimo Fabi excluded the Virology Laboratory from the diagnostics on Sars-Cov2 samples to create from nothing, and at a high price, a team of hygiene doctors , who, in addition to having operated in the absence of an agreement with the Company, signed retroactively on 12 May 2021 with effect from 23 February 2020, would have delayed the responses on the swabs so much as to send the emergency room into a tailspin. Now the families of the victims also want answers. This was announced by Luca Berni, a lawyer from Parma, from the pool of lawyers who assist the families of those who died from Covid throughout Italy.

«In that period I made several reports on some deaths that occurred at the Maggiore hospital. We hope that the Prosecutor’s investigation will clarify whether those deaths might have been avoided and, if so, who is responsible. The difficulties in the emergency room are no mystery, where patients in serious conditions remained waiting for treatment until the positive result arrived. Now we need to get to the bottom of things to give justice to the family.” That situation was confirmed directly to the lawyer with a letter dated 23 June 2020, signed by a group of doctors from the Maggiore, which reads: «There is no doubt that some behaviors of the company management contributed to the high mortality rate of the our hospital. The delay in execution and reporting is one of the causes. This very serious delay was admitted by doctors Venturi and Fabi themselves.” They underline how “the delay in swabs facilitated the spread of the epidemic with consequent deaths and this was caused by the blocking of swab investigations at the Uoc of Virology”. Finally they explain how the patients’ records “only reported positive or negative swabs, but not the report signed by a specialist with the appropriate specialization”. And that Igiene communicated the results of the swabs “by telephone or by e-mail: and if someone misunderstood, how reliable was it?”. The investigations, perhaps, will provide the answers to assess whether there was a culpable epidemic.