Gimbe: “No strategy pushes towards a new blockade”

10/20/2020 Health



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“The choice of do not introduce more drastic measures to protect the economy highlights the “no strategy»To plan the restrictions on day numbers reiterating measures that are too weak against the advance of virus“It is the criticism of the president of the Gimbe Foundation Nino Cartabellotta to the government’s decisions to contain the spread of infections, considered at least insufficient. According to the Foundation, first component of “no strategy” is to do Drive by the numbers of the day define the scope of containment measures, without considering the current dynamics of the epidemic, very different from those of the first wave: «This inexorably favors the increase of infections and nullifies the effects of the measures for various reasons. The first is that the figures reported daily by the Civil Protection Bulletin do not reflect the day’s cases at all because there is an average delay of 15 days from contagion to notification, since the mean time between infection and the appearance of symptoms is 5 days (range 2 to 14 days). In addition, according to the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the median time between the onset of symptoms and sampling / diagnosis is 3 days (week 7-13 October), but it could be longer considering the laboratory tests and the times notification. Furthermore, for asymptomatic cases it is not known because the promptness in requesting the swab depends on the effectiveness of the test and trace activity. Not only: “The communication of new cases from the Regions to Civil Protection does not occur in real time: for example, in the week of October 5 to 11, less than a third of the cases were notified within 2 days of diagnosis, 54% between 3 and 5 days and 14% after more than 6 days, however, this delay increases progressively due to the increasing number of cases ”.

According to the analysis of data from the Gimbe Foundation, «the contagion curve You have now hired a exponential trend: In the week 13-19 October, the number of currently positive cases increased from 82,764 to 134,003 (+ 53.7%) and the proportion of positive cases / cases analyzed in one week increased from 6.4% to 10.4 %. Trends that reflect both the number of hospitalized patients with symptoms, which increased in the last 7 days from 4,821 to 7,676 (+ 59.2%) and those in intensive care from 452 to 797 (+ 76.3%) with signs of overload in several Regions, both on the progressive increase in fatality ». To this must be added that the test and trace system the probability of underestimating cases increases because the expansion of the basin of non-isolated asymptomatic patients further accelerates the spread of infection. Cartabellotta also underlines the misalignment between the measurements of the last two Dpcm and the circular of October 12 from the Ministry of Health in which four scenarios of evolution of the epidemic in relation to the different levels of risk accompanied by related measures to be implemented in the different sectors.

“Considering that several Regions – he explains – are now in the high / very high risk phase, it is inexplicable that the recommended measures have not been introduced by the new Dpcm, which followed the indications of the Scientific Technical Committee, nor implemented by the Regions , who have participated in the drafting of the document “.

“Not preventing the epidemic curve from rising when we had a great advantage over the virus – concludes Cartabellotta – today imposes the need for containment measures able to anticipate the virus, planned in predictive models for at least 2-3 weeks, because the non-strategy will inevitably push the country towards that new blockade that nobody wants and that we cannot afford ».