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There was an alternative to emergency shutdown? Could the blows to the economy and the crisis of entire sectors be avoided? With “yes” and “buts”, no history is made. Of course. However, someone had a different idea, the result of a careful mathematical study. In short: more monitoring and fewer indiscriminate closures, to avoid deaths and save the economy. The suggestion, signed by six leading scientists, was sent to the addresses of Giuseppe Conte and the minister hope. But the government basically ignored it.
There is originally a paper scientist, what ilGiornale.it I got to read, signed by physicists Antonio Bianconi, Augusto Marcelli, Gaetano Campi and Andrea Perali. Studying the evolution of cases of COVID-19 In the early stages in China, South Korea and Italy, scholars found last March that in the beautiful country “the epidemic could have stopped in times of the order of 20 days“Rapid testing, using cell-based infection tracking technologies and isolating contagious people from their families, would have been sufficient.” An “alternative containment system”, very different from the emergency shutdown, which the authors call “Case search and mobile tracking“(CFMT). And that would have been much more effective than many dpcm.
Quantify the effectiveness of policies containment, the researchers coined, on the basis of complex calculations, an indicator called “factor s”. The lower this number, the better the fight against the pandemic. It must be said that in all three countries, governments finally succeeded in stopping the race of the virus. Nobody doubts it. What the research highlights is the “speed”, and therefore the effectiveness, of the measures taken to “bend” the contagion curve. The figures speak for themselves: China is at 9, South Korea at 5, while Italy is the worst with a “factor s”As of 31. Translated: Korean strategy made it possible to achieve the goal six times faster than the policies implemented by Prime Minister Conte. The success, say the authors, comes from the fact that Seoul has undergone “more than 250,000 tests corresponding to about 0.5% of its population, quickly identifying a large number of asymptomatic infections that have been put into quarantine“The monitoring of movements of positive cases, in fact,” is clearly correlated with the arrest of the growth rate “of infections, while” the only spatial confinement of the population “, as Italy did,” does not is enough. “More than a emergency shutdown general, therefore, selective quarantines and specific tests would be needed. A model that can not only stop the epidemic “in a short time (2τ = 14 days), as shown in both China and Korea”, but can also help “keep the spread of the epidemic below the threshold, stopping thus the explosion of exponential growth as shown in both Singapore and Israel ”.
In Italy, however, the policy on contact tracking she was a great dancer, as revealed in Coronavirus Black Book (Click here). At first the ministry prescribed dropper swabs, then the Veneto took a different path, eventually almost everyone was convinced of the goodness of tracking infections. But in the summer something went wrong and in the fall the system went completely wrong. A missed opportunity. “This study, the authors wrote in March, strongly suggests extending the focus of mobile tracking to Italian regions and around the world, in particular when the total number of contagious people is limited and the spread of the process is in the pre-threshold phase (PTP) or in the growth phase near the threshold. “Italy afterestate in short, it was in a perfect phase to apply the “mobile” model, thanks to the low number of easily traceable infected. It would have required a smarter use of tracking apps (not like Immuni, which has become a joke), a massive increase in testing for all asymptomatic (not queues in drive in) and the isolation of those infected outside of family contexts to avoid family and condominium groupings. What went wrong?
To understand this, let’s go back to March 29. That day the four researchers, together with Andrea Crisanti and Giampietro Ravagnan, send a letter to Conte and Speranza to illustrate the results of the investigation. Their labors have produced an alternative system for emergency shutdown, useful not only in the middle of the first wave but also for the future. And they want it to be available. They are also available to “provide free” the code of the developed program. But the offer is ignored. Why?
Tomorrow we will talk about it with Bianconi and Ravagnan in a live broadcast, online from the 15th Giornale.it, promoted by Eureca and moderated by the president Angelo Polimeno Bottai. The two scholars will explain why, according to them, the mobile tracking It would not only reduce the victims, but it would also preserve the productive system. And perhaps we will try to understand why, despite that study, the country, after a summer of hope, is once again on the verge of emergency shutdown.
