Workers move the coffins of coronavirus victims in Ponte San Pietro, Italy.
Photo: Matteo Biatta/Ropi/Zuma PressWhen a close friend of Michela Rosalia Pedrini died of the new coronavirus last month, her grief was so deep she nearly fainted. Since then, her sorrow has turned into rage—and a desire to find out what went wrong and who is to blame.
“It makes me angry. There is a lot of pain and bitterness,” says Ms. Pedrini, whose friend, Gennaro Leardi, worked as a hospital administrator near Bergamo, an area ravaged by the virus.
Days before he got sick, Mr. Leardi told her he was worried the hospital wasn’t doing enough to prevent coronavirus patients from infecting everyone else. A spokeswoman for the hospital declined to comment.
“No one is bringing back my Gennaro,” Ms. Pedrini adds. “But I don’t want him to be one of the many silent deaths. People need to know what happened.”
Italy is only just getting over the worst of the health emergency, but in Lombardy—the heartland of Europe’s pandemic—the recriminations and judicial investigations have already started.
Relatives and friends of many victims want to know whether their deaths could have been avoided. Politicians are trading accusations over the handling of the crisis. And prosecutors have opened investigations to determine whether there was culpable negligence in specific cases, such as in nursing homes and at the hospital near Bergamo where Mr. Leardi worked. The inquiries are likely to lead to court cases that could drag on for years.
Many critics have linked Lombardy’s explosive death toll—11,400 confirmed deaths, more than three times China’s official tally—to key failures by regional and national authorities.
Italy’s national association of doctors said last week that Lombardy’s “disastrous situation” was attributable to mistakes that ranged from the lack of protective equipment for medical staff, to not enough testing of infected people, to the failure to quarantine some virus-hit towns early on.
Lombardy’s top health official, Giulio Gallera, replied that the region followed recommendations from Italy’s health ministry in Rome to test only people with symptoms. Mr. Gallera said the region had asked Rome on March 3 to quarantine two towns in Valle Seriana, outside Bergamo but Rome didn’t act on it. The national government has said Lombardy had the authority to quarantine towns in its region.
Italian prosecutors have zeroed in on another possible failing: the March 8 request by Lombardy’s regional government to transfer recovering coronavirus patients from hospitals to nursing homes. The investigation is looking into whether the move, aimed at freeing up beds in overcrowded hospitals, contributed to the spread of infections in nursing homes.
Hundreds of residents in Lombardy’s nursing homes have died of Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
Italian police this week seized documents from the offices of Lombardy’s regional government as part of the investigation. Police have also conducted searches in several nursing homes in Milan and elsewhere in Lombardy. Prosecutors say potential charges include manslaughter.
Lombardy’s Governor, Attilio Fontana, said the coronavirus patients were isolated from other residents of the nursing homes.
“Some decisions were taken when we were in the middle of a tsunami,” Mr. Fontana said in a recent radio interview. “There were empty parts of nursing homes that weren’t being used where some patients were placed because there was no space in the hospitals. There was no contact with the nursing home’s residents.”
The regional government is cooperating with the investigation, Mr. Fontana said on Wednesday. His administration has also set up its own commission of inquiry.
Prosecutors have opened a separate investigation to establish what went wrong in and around the city of Bergamo, which became the symbol of Italy’s virus tragedy because of its high death toll. Around 5,500 people died in March in the province of Bergamo, compared with an average of under 1,000 in the same month in previous years. Health experts and local officials say the only plausible explanation is the pandemic.
Michela Rosalia Pedrini, right, wants justice for her friend Gennaro Leardi, left, who died of Covid-19.
Photo: MICHELA ROSALIA PEDRINIThe probe aims to establish whether a mishandling of the health crisis at the hospital where Mr. Leardi worked—in Bergamo province’s Valle Seriana—contributing to one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks.
Valle Seriana, a heavily industrialized mountain valley, for several weeks was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. In Nembro, one of the valley’s worst-hit towns, the coronavirus has killed around 1.3% of the 11,000 residents—the world’s highest known mortality rate for the disease.
“The death toll could have been lower,” said Claudio Cancelli, Nembro’s mayor. “Lombardy’s health system struggled to deal with the emergency. We need to understand why because this could happen again.”
By the time Valle Seriana’s first two residents tested positive for the virus on Feb. 23, infections had already spread inside the local hospital and outside in the community.
In Codogno, a town in another part Lombardy that detected a serious coronavirus outbreak in the same period, the local hospital shut down its admissions area for a deep clean. It remains shut.
Not so in Valle Seriana. After coronavirus cases were confirmed at the valley’s main hospital, its management closed the admissions area, but regional authorities ordered it reopened a few hours later, over local objections. Mr. Gallera, the regional health chief, said the hospital’s services were needed and that the reopening came only after a full sanification. Hospital workers and people who had come in contact with Covid-19 patients were tested for the virus, he said.
For days, potentially infected people were allowed to sit next to healthy ones in the waiting room, recalls Francesco Zambonelli, who brought his father to the emergency room on Feb. 28. Both men had Covid-19 symptoms. His father later succumbed to the virus.
The decision to quickly reopen the emergency room is at the center of the judicial investigation.
Mr. Zambonelli says his father likely became infected at that same hospital a few weeks earlier while visiting his mother, who had been hospitalized for a heart problem and developed coronavirus symptoms while there. She died on Feb. 22 but was never tested for the virus.
“The first key error was to underestimate the risk of the coronavirus in Italy,” said Mr. Zambonelli. “Someone made a mistake or minimized the problem and must take responsibility.”
Mr. Zambonelli noted that although the central government in late January declared a health emergency, it failed to take basic steps such as ensuring it had sufficient supplies of equipment such as face masks and testing kits.
The Italian government has said it took early action to prevent the virus from spreading, such as suspending direct flights to and from China before any other European country. Italy and many other countries early on in the epidemic used up their stockpiles of vital medical supplies and then struggled to buy more because of a jump in global demand.
While Codogno and surrounding towns were quickly placed under strict quarantine after the first cases there were confirmed, in Valle Seriana life continued largely as normal for weeks, until the whole of Lombardy was placed under lockdown from March 8, followed two days later by the rest of Italy.
“We have a duty to explain to these people what happened,” says Giampiero Calegari, the head of the mayors’ association for Valle Seriana’s 38 towns. “After people have overcome the phase in which they cry for their dead, they start asking why they died. And they have the right to know.”
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Eric Sylvers at eric.sylvers@wsj.com
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