Italians admitted to hospital for coronavirus are getting younger, a health official has claimed.

“The type of patient is changing,” Luca Lorini, the head of anaesthesia and intensive care at a northern Italian hospital, has said.

“They are a bit younger, between 40 to 45 years old and the cases are more complicated.”

Dr Lorini, who works at a hospital in Bergamo, told radio programme RaiNews24: ”People are arriving who got ill six or seven days ago and treated themselves at home – and then their conditions became more and more critical.”

Twelve per cent of those who have been treated in intensive care are aged between 19 and 50, according to official figures released last week. Around 52 per cent are between 51 and 70 years old, with the rest all over 70.

Recently, hospitals in Lombardy have seen people aged between 25 and 50 diagnosed with Covid-19 and subsequently hospitalised for treatment, according to local media reports.

“Even if the data is only preliminary, the fact there are more young people hospitalised and in intensive care compared to the first wave can be interpreted as a natural phenomenon,” Pierluigi Lopalco, a professor from Pisa University, told Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

“In Italy, the first clusters of the infection started around hospitals, more commonly frequented by older people, and in small towns,” he said.

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“Now the virus has spread, it is travelling around the whole country way more and it is younger people, with lots of social contact, that are more at risk of contracting the disease if they do not stick to the rules of social distancing.”

The whole of Italy has been placed in lockdown as confirmed cases of Covid-19 have soared.

More than 1,400 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in Europe’s worst-hit country, with 21,157 infections to date.