The Covid-19 Between State of Emergency and Exception in Italy and Its Consequences on Human Rights

Abstract

In mid-December 2019, several atypical cases of pneumonia were detected in hospitals in Wuhan City – Hubei Province – in Inner China. It turns out that the first patients had already fallen ill in early December or even mid-November. However, only on the last day of the year 2019, Chinese doctors were able to officially identify a new virus in a 41-year-old patient admitted 5 days earlier. The virus belongs to the class of “coronavirus”, the same to which the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) viruses belong. It is initially baptized 2019-nCov, or “new 2019 coronavirus”. In February, the official name assigned to the virus is Sars-COV-2 and the associated disease is named COVID-19. The outbreak took on considerable proportions in China and then spread to the rest of the world, leading the World Health Organization to declare the infection a “pandemic” on 11 March 2020. The containment strategies applied in the most affected countries have proved to be very different in effectiveness, to the point that the lethality of the virus appears very different from country to country. This difference in impact has led to different legal, economic and social consequences.