Italian healthcare officials said Tuesday they are concerned by the results of a national serological testing initiative, which showed that just 2.5 percent of the people in Italy had been exposed to the coronavirus, meaning it could be easy for a second wave of the virus to gain footing in the country.
The national testing scheme carried out by the Italian Red Cross, Italy's National Statistics Institute, and regional health officials examined the blood of nearly 65,000 people in more than 2,000 cities and towns across Italy.
The total number of people tested fell well short of the goal of 150,000 the Red Cross said was needed to provide a definitive result. But in a statement, the Red Cross said that the partial results were enough to extrapolate national estimates.
Based on the results, the Ministry of Health estimated late Monday that 1.48 million Italians had been exposed to the coronavirus, around six times more than the official figures of nearly 250,000 infections. The number is the equivalent to nearly 2.5 percent of the country's population of around 60 million.
The tests were carried out between May 15 and July 15, using test kits donated by Abbott Laboratories.
According to Italian media reports, expectations at the start were that the antibody could be found in as many as one in five Italians, which would imply they had some immunity to the virus.
According to Pierluigi Lopalco, an epidemiologist with the University of Pisa and the head of the regional anti-coronavirus task force in the southern region of Apulia, the results are worrying.
"What concerns us the most is the low total figure," Lopalco said Tuesday. "In the southern parts of the country, less than 1 percent of the citizens have the antibody. In the north, where we thought the virus had circulated more, only Lombardy has a high level of antibodies."
Lombardy, which includes Italy's financial capital of Milan, is the Italian region hardest hit by the coronavirus, accounting for nearly half of the country's more than 35,000 deaths. In Bergamo, the region's fourth-largest city and the Italian city with the highest per-capita infection rate, around half of the population is found to have the antibody for the coronavirus. But in the region as a whole, the rate is 7.5 percent, around three times the national average.
"The low rate means that the vast majority of Italians have not yet encountered the virus," Lopalco said. "If the virus were to move freely around Italy it would find a large prairie on which to graze."
Also on Tuesday, Andrea Mandelli, president of the Federation of Italian Pharmacists, said test results show Italy's success in containing the spread of the coronavirus was "primarily (due) to the effectiveness of the measures taken to prevent the virus' spread" but not to high immunity levels.
According to epidemiological data gathered alongside the serological tests, 27.3 percent of those who had been infected with the virus never showed symptoms, a fact that the Ministry of Health said illustrated the importance of social distancing, mask-wearing, and other hygiene rules to help avoid cases where the virus is spreading unwittingly.
