Italy COVID-19 death toll tops 90,000

Italy on Thursday reported 422 COVID-19-related deaths, down from 476 fatalities on Wednesday and pushing to 90,241 the cumulative death toll since the pandemic first officially started in this country in late February 2020.

The Ministry of Health also reported 13,659 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of active infections to 430,277 on Thursday. On Wednesday, 13,189 new cases were recorded.

Also on Thursday, a total of 17,680 COVID-19 patients were reported as recovered, up from 15,748 recoveries on Wednesday and pushing the overall number of recoveries since the start of the pandemic to 2,076,928.

Of the total number of currently infected patients, the vast majority -- 408,383 people -- are quarantined at home with light or no symptoms, 19,743 are hospitalized with symptoms, and 2,151 are hospitalized in intensive care.

Most of the currently infected people -- 62,349 -- are in the southern Campania region, whose capital is Naples. The central Lazio region reported 58,026 cases and the northern Valle d'Aosta region 188 cases.

In its weekly COVID-19 monitoring report, the Ministry of Health said that while the overall situation in Italy "shows slight signs of improvement," elsewhere in Europe the pandemic situation is getting worse due to "the emergence of new viral variants with higher transmissibility, which have already been identified in our country."

"A new rapid increase in the number of cases in the coming weeks is possible if strict mitigation measures are not guaranteed at both national and regional levels" in Italy, the report said.

"The need to continue with the drastic reduction in physical interactions between people is therefore confirmed," according to the report, which covered the week of Jan. 18-24.

On Tuesday, Health Minister Roberto Speranza extended until Feb. 15 the ban on direct flights to Italy from Brazil. The ban was first announced on Jan. 16 after the Italian health authorities identified a new variant of the coronavirus in four passengers arriving from Brazil.

Also on Thursday, the Ministry of Health reported that a total of 2,318,481 Italians have already been inoculated with an anti-COVID-19 vaccine. Of them, 942,551 people have received both doses.

Right now, Italy is administering two different vaccines -- one developed by German biotechnology company BioNTech in collaboration with U.S. multinational pharmaceutical company Pfizer, and another developed by U.S. biotechnology company Moderna.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for use in the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) on Dec. 21, 2020. The EMA approved the Moderna vaccine on Jan. 6 this year.

Vaccination campaigns with authorized COVID-19 vaccines are underway in some countries around the world. Meanwhile, further 238 candidate vaccines are being developed -- 63 of which are in clinical development -- in several countries including Germany, China, Britain, and the United States, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated on Feb. 2.