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In Italy, what experts have called the “dike” of the pandemic has now been broken the 3% threshold value that indicates the relationship between positive cases and swabs performed. The physicist told ANSA Giorgio Sestili, founder and one of the curators of the Facebook page “Coronavirus: scientific data and analysis”.
Exceeding this value explains the increase in cases that occurred on October 7. Today the cases have increased, passing the 4,400 threshold with 120,000 swabs performed.
The writer and engineer had calculated the levee’s 3% value last spring. Thomas Pueyo in an article that went viral and since then this threshold has also found great consensus in the scientific world. “It is a value that indicates that the goal is to do a lot of swabs and find few positives,” Sestili observes.
In August, the relationship between positive cases and tests was just over 1, continued the physicist, but now we are above 4%: “This means that the dam is broken and that now we are missing many cases.” It is a value above the threshold, but lower than that found, for example, in April 2020, when the ratio between analyzed cases and swabs was around 10%.
In general, the expert continues, it can be said that while the ratio is low, the cases analyzed are almost all the real ones, as happened in the summer. If, on the contrary, the ratio rises, the cases begin to escape: the tests do not reach everyone and those that do escape continue to spread the infection.
Exceeding the 3% threshold, he concludes, “justifies the high jump on October 7: when the embankment broke, we must expect an increase in cases, the number of which will probably continue to grow in the coming weeks.”
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