In Italy several regions have been consistently reporting a very low number of new daily cases for few days, and the number of people in ICUs is decreasing steadily.
Situation in Lombardy is still not good however, as we are still getting ~1000 new official cases per day... and those numbers are pretty unreilable as per an article I shared some pages ago. As a further confirmation of that, I discovered that, out of 10 families living in my apartment block, 4 of them had symptomatic COVID cases, with only one woman being officially counted in the statistics due to having done a swab. Fortunately all of them have already recovered, but it still freaks me out to discover that I had so many COVID cases living literally next door
Including friends and colleagues, I personally know ~30 people who caught the disease, with only the woman I mentioned before being counted as an official case.
Today the Bergamo province released
an estimate based on a form filled daily on a volunteer basis reporting symptoms since the start of the outbreak. Based on such data, they estimated that 35% of the province population caught the virus, meaning 381'000 cases in this province alone... many more cases than all the ones officially reported in the whole country!
Premier Conte has just finished a conference about the end of the lockdown. On 4th May also some industries that are not part of the food & beverage supply chain will be allowed to open, provided they can ensure workers safety (which I fear will not happen in smaller companies, as they know that it will be difficult to control every company). It will also be possible to travel again between towns, but not between regions (as before, work and health issues are an exception to travel restrictions). Many restriction will still be in place however.
Still, our NHS is not ready yet for the inevitable 2nd contagion wave, which I fear will happen earlier than forecast since we Italians are not really good at following rules