“Covid like Spanish: it will last two years” – Chronicle

COVID-19 will not leave today or tomorrow. Even the vaccine it should not be taken for granted. We have to overcome it, “we have to resist a couple of years at least, not from an organic point of view, obviously, but in the sense of putting ourselves in the perspective of living with the virus for a certain time, as happened to our predecessors . fighting with him Spanish between 1918 and 1920“And by no means is it certain that this battle against pestilence 5.0” will end in Second wave just started with us too. In the past, pandemics very often, despite their epidemiological differences, have undergone a long and fluctuating development that could also be repeated in our case ”.

Coronavirus, the newsletter for October 10

The 89-year-old man trusts in the compass of the great magisterium of History Giorgio Cosmacini, the best known medical historian in our country, to try to trace the route to follow in the stormy sea of ​​Covid. Wave after wave, the scholar has no intention of going below deck. Stay up-to-date, in the piece, with your latest Health and Disease Concepts manual until the time of the coronavirus (Pantarei editions).

Professor, to capture the development of this infection we need to know what happened in the time of the Spanish?

“The parallel can’t be perfect, mind you. The key criteria for investigating a pandemic, I mean spread, contagion, as well as morbidity and mortality, are obviously different between that disease and the current one. As well as the socio-political and socio-sanitary conditions. This, however, does not mean that the experience of Spagnola, the last plague in history before Covid-19, although it cannot offer us irrefutable certainties about the present, allows us to advance more than reasonable assumptions about the present “.

Starting with the duration and how will the current health emergency end?

We surely cannot think that this pandemic will leave us anytime soon. We have been in the game for just six months … La Spagnola shook the world for two years, with a heterogeneous development, from country to country, and between ups and downs. It came out without a vaccine or a specific antiviral treatment having been prepared ”.

Will this also happen with the new Coronavirus?

“Let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if the pandemic ended in the absence of prophylaxis. The combination of herd immunity achieved in individual populations and the progressive loss of virulence of the pathogen itself was what determined the end of Spagnola. history, which must also be heard more in Italy where, however, we still do not depend too much on its treasure.

Did this second wave take you by surprise?

“Not at all, though not always, often over the centuries pests have had two, three, four stages of development.”

Will it be worse than the first?

“It depends on how the confrontation between the macro-survivors, the humans, and the micro-survivor, the virus, is characterized. The game is played on what will be our response to the infection and at the same time on the way in which the pathogen itself behaves. Spagnola in two years in Italy has claimed 600 thousand victims “.

Are you pessimistic?

“I do not intend to play the Cassandra of the situation. The influence of a century ago was mainly directed at the workforce, while Covid is enraging the elderly and therefore a less wide range of citizenship. “This, leaving aside the hope of a vaccine, which I myself hope will be discovered as soon as possible, our defenses continue to be those suggested by the Decameron. No more, no less.”

What does Boccaccio teach us contemporaries?

“The resource is the same as seven hundred years ago, it is called distancing, isolation, not talking about each other, to put it in Boccaccio’s prose. Let’s read the preamble to the Decameron and we will understand the correct attitude to follow in this as well. health emergency “.