Italian mayor fights lone battle for mass virus blood testing

The mayor of a pandemic-hit Italian town is trying to get everyone's blood tested in a controversial attempt to end weeks of confinement and finally get people back to work.The story of Robbio mayor Roberto Francese has generated a fair bit of interest in a Mediterranean country where people's primary mission is to not catch COVID-19.

"We can never improve the situation without separating the healthy from the sick," Francese told AFP.Separating the healthy from the sick in a 21st century Western democracy might strike some as a mad idea from a bad science fiction film.The idea is that people who get infected with the new disease and survive develop at least some immunity against it.But COVID-19 is a new disease and the science is not there yet to confirm whether coronavirus antibodies will actually make us safe.

Italy's ISS public health institute clearly states that"there are currently no commercial kits to confirm the diagnosis" of the novel coronavirus through blood tests."I will pay for all those who cannot afford it," he said at a town gym where the blood tests were being given by nurses in green coveralls.Francese also brushes off the regional authorities' decision to ban laboratories from accepting the town's tests for processing.

The Italian government reportedly intends to secure a load of certified tests kits to see how many people actually have antibodies -- and what this might possibly mean given that at the moment there is no vaccine or readily available treament for COVID-19."The people who develop antibodies cannot be reinfected," the project's scientific coordinator Andrea Desse told AFP.

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