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There were 19,644 cases of new infections during the day yesterday, with 177,669 swabs. A figure slightly higher than the previous day, which comes on the eve of the drafting of the new Prime Minister’s Decree that also provides for restrictive measures for schools.
Superiors with DAD
Keeping high school students at home, in distance education at 75%, is one of the solutions present in the draft DPCM that is likely to be officially released today. Publication that should have been made yesterday, were it not for the Regions that have asked for an autonomy of the distance learning quota that can even reach 100%. At the base of the decision the pressure on public transport that has kept the bench since the beginning of the school year and accused as one of the causes of the increase in infections.
Data on infections at school
The school did not cause the increase in infections, this is the thesis that we published yesterday in our newspaper contained in a study entitled “Research on the spread of the virus in schools”, carried out by Enrico Bucci, Guido Poli and Antonella Viola, for the Pact transversal by science. The study highlighted how the opening of schools did not affect the general increase in infections, even more so: it is not the point from where the infection begins. But the virus enters schools as in all settings and spreads.
Available data and their interpretation
Yesterday Minister Azzolina said that the outbreaks in the school are decreasing and that the transmission of the virus within the school is still limited. His comment on social networks stems from the observation that the outbreaks between October 5 and 11 at school accounted for 3.8% of the total, while between October 12 and 18 the figure drops to 3, 5%. Do infections increase in other contexts and decrease in school?
The minister’s reassurance was quickly cooled by Lorenzo Ruffino, an academic and author along with Vittorio Nicoletta of an unofficial tracking of data on school infections. The first follow-up was carried out in Italy in relation to the school.
Ruffino pointed out that the data on the decrease indicated by the minister are not reliable, since the cases without “epidemiological link” are increasing, because the “contact tracing” has been skipped. For Ruffino, therefore, the minister has misrepresented the figures.
Another issue concerns the concept of an outbreak itself. Yesterday, during our live broadcast for OrizzonteScuolaTv, one of the authors of the study “Research on the spread of the virus in schools”, Enrico Bucci, challenged the methods of data flow and the very concept of outbreak. “There is no constant observatory dedicated to schools, although the data exists, no one uses it. If an epidemic started at school tomorrow morning, we would not notice. The number of outbreaks provided is not a reliable figure, because the number of people involved is unknown.In short, says Bucci: an outbreak is considered such if it consists of two or 16 people.
If you skip contact tracing, you risk chaos
What did Ruffino mean when he wrote on Twitter that there are more cases with no epidemiological link? According to the figures provided by the ISS, between the period of October 5 to 11 and the period of October 12 to 18, the percentage of cases in which it was not possible to trace the origin went from 33 to 43.5%.
A percentage in which the school also participates, according to Rebecca Giazzi, a health assistant in Piacenza, informed ANSA. It was she who performed the first swab on the Codogno hospital nurse on the night of February 21 of last year, who had followed ‘patient one’.
According to Giazzi, school is an area that makes contact tracing more difficult. “Today – he said – we have many positives, of which 20 are school-age children. Schools give rise to many contacts: in addition to children or young people, there are families, teachers, families of teachers and staff. If the child is positive, the parents cooperate, many times they thank us. The problem is the parents of the classmates because they often cause controversy: they do not know where to leave the children, they do not want them to be swabbed“.
Of the people who are contacted, Giazzi revealed, “there is not always collaboration. It is not easy to communicate with them: some accept the situation, take note of the quarantine, others question their work. Sometimes they insult us, but we keep going. Epidemiological investigations are essential“.
A “contact tracing” system gone haywire, not guaranteeing knowledge of the true extent of school-related infections. Confirmations also in an article by FattoQuotidiano reporting in a statement from Vittorio Demicheli, health director of Milan Ats, about the difficulties in providing the traces on time due to the increase in cases and lack of personnel. Therefore, school leaders are forced to take responsibility for free initiatives to prevent the spread of infections.
In short, without dedicated monitoring and a permanent observatory of data flows from the Ministry of Health, there is a risk of distorting the real scope of the impact of schools on the evolution of the epidemic. Another issue that was questioned yesterday by the biologist Bucci and the immunologist Viola refers to the protocols within schools. According to scholars, it is not enough to take the same security measures in school as in other contexts, ad hoc measures are necessary. Perhaps, they suggest among the measures that can be adopted, starting to use the mask during the entire period of stay at school would help prevent contagion, eliminating the risk of closure.
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