Covid, Andrea Crisanti: “Christmas? Take advantage of the holidays to close everything and try to stop the infection”

Operation “Slet’s have christmas”Of which no one talks openly but that everyone would like to realize that they do not like Andrea Crisanti, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Padua. Rather than reopen for Christmas, I think the situation is so bad that I have to advise the opposite: take advantage of the end of the year holidays to close everything in those two weeks and try to stop the infection. But I understand that we have to take into account the needs of the economy ”, says the scientist behind the general scan in an interview with La Repubblica. To see positive signs on the horizon in the face of the pandemic, as Health Minister Roberto Speranza said, “we need a lot of faith,” he reasons. “If you look at the infection curve and the dynamics of deaths, you understand how we are in a situation comparable to March – specify -. And if we take into account that with the total closure of that time we had to wait until the end of April to glimpse the famous end of the tunnel, you can already guess where we are. And we’re not even doing a real lockdown here. ” Conclusion? “The impact of the restrictive measures will be less than then and the restrictions will take longer to take effect.“.

Crisanti’s invitation to the government is “to do something: extend the opening hours of stores, stagger the entrances, avoid meetings in every way, at home and away“For Chrysants we have to decide ‘how much suffering and deaths we are willing to accept. The system can also endure and at the same time have a higher number of deaths than in the first wave. But the metric must be calibrated in human and social suffering. , not in the stability of the system. ”A new blockade is inevitable:“ The numbers will impose it – he says -. The RT will remain greater than or equal to one for a long time. It is a mathematical question ”. As for the controls, “With this level of infections, the number of swabs performed no longer makes sense. It made sense to make 400,000 a day to block the distribution chain. At this point, the tide of the virus is out of control.

Crisanti also answered a question about schools: “It should have been a different approach. Children up to the age of ten get sick little, primary school and kindergarten are not much of a problem. But we should have evaluated the effects of early opening on individual school districts. Then decide. Instead, we have prepared various measures just because, suggested by the CTS, we had not even received the tables of the Law at Mount Sinai. ” On the subject of vaccines, Crisanti, like everyone else, remembers that it is an operation that takes a very long time. “Having the first doses in January, February or March certainly does not affect the spread of the epidemic. Let’s talk about it again when 70% of the population is vaccinated“And that’s when?” A year will pass. But don’t you realize that they didn’t even manage to cover the need for the flu vaccine? Imagine what will happen with the anti-Covid. “So to get out of the emergency will take a long time: “End of the 21st, beginning of the 22nd.”