Italy’s death count from the novel coronavirus topped 20,000 on Monday but its number of critically ill patients dropped for the 10th successive day.
The 566 new deaths reported by the civil protection service take Italy’s fatalities total to 20,465 – officially second in the world behind the United States.
The drop in patients in intensive care from a peak of 4,068 on April 3 to 3,260 on Monday confirmed a general improvement in Italy’s COVID-19 trends.
The rise in new infections dropped to a new low of just two percent.
The ISS public health institute’s Giovanni told to the media, “The time that passes between the moment of contagion and the moment we receive the data could be 20 days”.
“So when you read that there are 300 new cases, these cases were infections acquired 20 days ago”, Giovanni further added.
The decision has been backed by doctors but opposed by businesses that doubt they will be able to survive standing idle for three more weeks.
“There are positive signs, but the number of deaths is still high,” Rezza said.
On Tuesday, the country will reopen some bookshops and laundries on a trial basis to see how social distancing measures can be safely enforced down the road.
Overall, law enforcement forces have checked 6,976,423 people and 2,831,550 activities between March 11, the day after the nationwide lockdown effectively entered into force, and April 12, the data found.
Italy has declared a six-month national state of emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic on Jan. 31.
The government imposed a nationwide lockdown that went into effect on March 10. One month later, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced the lockdown would continue until May 3.
The coronavirus pandemic on Monday moved close to infect over 19,00,000 people around the world.
The United States (US) has been the worst-hit nation that has reported close to 30% of the total confirmed cases in the world.
The US now has over 5,60,891 COVID-19 positive cases in the country. This includes all the 50 states of the mainland, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as reported by CNN.