ROME – Italy’s northern Lombardy region, where Europe's coronavirus outbreak erupted last year, asked the national government Thursday for more vaccines to help stem a surge of new cases that are taxing the health system in the province of Brescia.
Brescia, with a population of around 1.2 million, has seen its daily caseload go from the mid-100s at the start of February to 901 on Wednesday, due in part to clusters of cases traced to the British variant.
Doctors say the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Brescia's main public hospital has gone from an average of around 200 to 300 recently.
The region’s governor, Attilio Fontana, said he told the health minister during a call Thursday that Lombardy needed an “immediate delivery (of