Rome (AFP)

"Polizia di Roma": a yellow stripe printed blocks the access to the entrance to the building, which is still asleep. An eye sometimes appears at a window, behind a curtain that is immediately closed to protect itself from the gaze of the curious.

While Italy, where the pandemic has caused the death of more than 34,000 people, is cautiously emerging from deconfinement, two new outbreaks of Covid-19 have been identified in Rome, totaling more than a hundred cases.

One of them declared himself in an illegally occupied building in Garbatella, a popular district in the south of the capital.

Nine cases have been recorded there to date, including members of a Peruvian family and four of their close contacts, according to health authorities, who assure that the situation is "under control".

- "Non-stop" disinfection -

If it were not for the yellow plastic strips of the municipal police and the police car parked on the forecourt, nothing - or almost - would indicate the presence of this new home. After the ambulance ballet of the past few days, quiet neighborhood life has taken over.

On this Sunday morning, the customers of a nearby convenience store go out quietly after having done their shopping, plastic bags inflated with food at arm's length. One person walks his dog, another comes to empty his waste in garbage cans which vomit their overflow on the floor.

Police on duty and passersby all have a surgical mask on their noses. Little or no agitation, apart from the journalists of the Italian televisions who arrive camera in hand.

"The occupants who stay there are confined to the building," said one of the agents. "They are forbidden to go out, except for a few square meters of parking, just to get some fresh air. The Red Cross brings them their meals."

A sheet metal scaffolding overcomes the entrance hall of the rectangular building of ocher bricks, typical of those districts far from the historic center of Rome, which sprouted like mushrooms in the 1970s.

The shutters are closed on part of the seven floors. The building is apparently unhealthy - even if it does not really appear - and illegally occupied, with the support of an association.

"Its inhabitants are South Americans, Italians, working people, rather families," said Ion, an employee of the supermarket. "The situation is a bit peculiar there, because the toilets are common."

"It's been over three months that the virus has been running in Italy. So that doesn't worry us too much, it's a case like any other," he wants to believe. "We wear masks, we are careful".

"It is a building occupied since 2013, where there is always going back and forth, people who come from around the world," adds Raffaele, 77 years old, living in a neighboring building.

"There is absolutely no control," laments the retiree, behind his protective mask and his smoked sunglasses.

"Fear? It is related to the fact that it is a place where there is always traffic. Let's say that we are very careful, we disinfect everything non-stop. But hey look around, it's full of waste on the ground, "says the septuagenarian.

- Maximum vigilance -

The second outbreak - numerically the largest with 109 cases including five fatal - is located at the San Raffaele Pisana hospital, on the western outskirts of the capital. Two army vehicles controlled its surroundings on Sunday morning, but the situation was perfectly normal there.

There too, an epidemiological investigation is underway, according to regional health authorities, who assure that "vigilance remains very high".

The appearance of these two foci of Covid-19 in intramural Rome has caused concern, while the disease seems to be under control, even at its epicenter, in Lombardy (north), and the country has been shrinking since the beginning of May, slowly returning to its pre-pandemic face.

"No one was under any illusions and thought the problems were over," Ranieri Guerra, deputy director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said in the local press.

"This means that the virus has not lost its contagiousness, it is not weakening", it "circulates less but it is there", observes this Italian infectious disease specialist, seeing in it the demonstration that "we must not relax".

"These micro-foci were inevitable, but they are limited in time and in space. And today we have the instruments to intercept and circumscribe them," assures this infectiologist.

© 2020 AFP