ROME: For a fourth straight day, Italy’s daily new caseload of confirmed coronavirus infections has climbed higher.
Adding 19,037 COVID-19 cases on Friday, the nation raised its overall tally of confirmed infections in the pandemic to 2,028,354.
The figures from the Health Ministry on Christmas Day included 459 deaths registered since Thursday. That brings the number of known pandemic dead in Italy to 71,359.
As it has had most recently, the northeast Veneto region reported the highest daily caseload, with just over 5,000 confirmed infections registered on Friday.
That’s nearly double the day’s caseload in neighbouring Lombardy, the populous region which has suffered the most deaths and has had the most COVID-19 cases since Italy’s first native case emerged in February.