The curious case of San Marino during the COVID pandemic
New Europe visited the tiny republic, which is surrounded by the Italian border, in order to understand the differences between San Marino and its neighbor in terms of personal freedom and management of the pandemic.
Crossing the border from the northern Italian city of Rimini, a visitor will first arrive in the village of Dogana, where one can immediately feel an air of freedom and finally go out for dinner. While Italy is preparing for a strict lock-down and 10 pm a curfew, San Marino’s government decided has opted for more relaxed COVID measures as the size of its territory and small population allow effective control scheme by the authorities.
A media officer from the San Marino Council of Ministers explained in detail the different measures that the Sammarinese government has put in place.
“From Friday, December 18, we introduced a curfew at 12:30 am, but before we didn’t have such restrictions like in Italy because in our territory we don’t have places like squares of boulevards where you can have a big flow of people, especially on the weekends. Even on a normal day, we don’t have masses of people crowding into our streets. We have only 35,000 in San Marino.
The city center is reachable only by foot or with a cable car. About our plans for new year’s eve, we’ve decided on a 1:30 am curfew. This may seem like a nonsense gesture, but in reality, it is a good security measure because, at the moment in our restaurants, tables are only for fur people, with a distance of one and a half meters apart.
If on New Year’s Eve, you allow people to go out at midnight from the restaurant, a lot of people will gather outside and in a dangerous way. Here, we oblige the customers to stay at the table and celebrate seated at the table, while under the control of the owner of the restaurant. We learned from scientific evidence that this important to keep people in restaurants instead of allowing them to gather in squares where we can not control them. With this solution, our police force will not have to go around the city. They will focus only on enforcing the law on restaurants.
You have also to understand that we have around 150 bars or restaurants, so it is easy for our police force to control because our territory is very limited. During the most sensitive days of the week, like Friday and Saturday, our police is perfectly able to check all the dining places in the country.
We are only adapting the Italian rules to our peculiar situation. Bear in mind that San Marino is not part of the EU, and for this reason don’t get the same EU aid packages that Italy gets for businesses and commercial activities that are affected by COVID. It is important to note that now we don’t have the economic power to put in place support measures for those entrepreneurs that are affected by this crisis. A few months ago we had the options of a lockdown that would destroy the local economy or to go for a more acceptable compromise for our entrepreneurs.
The numbers are very limited for museums and cinemas and, therefore, so is the risk. In San Marino, we only have one cinema and eight museums, but if Italian visitors cannot come here, how many visitors are we going to have each day? The answer is almost zero. Between residents and Italian workers coming from outside, we have daily 30,000-35,000 people going around.
If the bordering Italian provinces are in lockdown, we won’t receive the normal tourist traffic and therefore the number of visitors is very low. Due to the economic crisis, we will not be able to provide support for a long time like Italy is. The Principality of Monaco is adopting exactly our own measures and they are adapted to the peculiar territorial situation. If our measures are a problem for the Italian government, Rome would have to ask San Marino to close its borders. There is a strong relation between our two countries. At the local level, we signed a medical memorandum years ago.
During the first wave, thanks to this cooperation agreement, we hosted five patients from Italy in our national hospital. At the moment the situation in our hospital is that we have five patients in the ICU, with a total of 20 COVID patients in the hospital. We can have around 16 beds in the ICU. In the event that we have more ICU patients in the future, the situation could become complicated. We have a good contact tracing system and we did more than 30,000 blood tests and more than 15,000 swab test, so we covered almost half of our population.
Our standard is one of the best in the world, and this is a fact, but I have to clarify then something that was in the press this week when our Heath Minister, Roberto Ciavatta, declared that a person who does not receive the COVID vaccine would have to pay for their own medical treatment if they are affected by the disease. I have to underline that this a declaration from our minister, but it is still not confirmed by our government, In any case, also at European level, we all need to get to a herd immunity with the vaccine as soon as possible. The other governments are going to be obliged to quickly motivate their citizens to take the vaccine. At that point, it would be possible to discuss vaccination certificates that allow people to enter public places, like museums or others.”