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They are photocopy cases. The start of the virus, the difficulties to recognize it and then the wave of death. In all municipalities, in the first hours of infection, doctors discover themselves without weapons. Although the government has known for weeks about the risks facing the country, ministerial directives are cumbersome, Ffp3 masks are missing, and adequate respirators to keep Covid’s most serious cases alive are insufficient to cope with the health tsunami. that exists. overwhelming. Net of all controversy, which will continue in the weeks after the discovery of “patient 1” in Codogno, the true weak point, which precipitates the situation in late February, is the government’s inaction.
Because although on January 20 you already have a document so alarming that you prefer not to disclose it for “don’t scare the citizens”stay with your hands? “There was no decision gap – assures the Corriere della Sera the Director General of Health Planning, Andrea Urbani, already on January 20 we had a list secret floor and that plan we follow. The line has been not to scare the population and work to contain the infection. “. It is a hypothetical study, for heaven’s sake. But already in those 55 pages it is clear that the risk for the country is very high. However, no one moves. Ministerial directives are not updated. So much so that at the end of February the one approved on January 27 is still in force. “suspected cases” only those people with one “severe acute respiratory infection” who have also been in “China risk areas”, who have worked or attended “An environment where patients are being treated” affected by Covid-19 or having close contact with a “probable case confirmed by nCoV”. According to these guidelines, Mattia, the 38-year-old patient hospitalized in codogno with pneumonia that does not respond to conventional treatment. It is thanks to the intuition of an anesthesiologist that, taking the responsibility of taking the exam “even if Italian protocols do not justify it”Unlock the situation and open the eyes of the government and the entire country.
There is also another directive from the Ministry of Health that, if applied to the letter, it would never allow us to discover the usefulness of heparin to defeat the coronavirus. She’s the one with no autopsies on patients killed by Covid-19. The reason is to avoid “wasting time” with cases whose results are already known. But in the Papa Giovanni XXII hospital, as said by Corriere della SeraAndrea Gianatti, director of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathological Anatomy, decides to do her thing. And, together with Aurelio Sonzogni, he begins to perform autopsies on March 23. “It became clear early enough that this disease manifested in multiple different forms,” he explains. The need to understand leads them to discover the usefulness of heparin against thrombosis.
The other major injury concerns i swabs. Many have been persuaded by the idea that to curb the infection, a massive buffer is needed to eliminate even the asymptomatic. But on this issue, the government (and the ISS experts) have always supported the opposite view. February 27 Angelo Borrelli and the ISS director, Franco Locatelli, announce that from that moment only the symptomatics will be analyzed to detect coronaviruses. The ISS puts it in writing in a document explaining how it is not “scientifically justifiable” to carry out the exams, given that “in the vast majority of cases they will be negative.” Furthermore, according to experts, the contribution of the asymptomatic to the spread of the epidemic “seems limited”. So it is better not to waste materials. And that is why Italy, in the first phase of the epidemic, will decide to carry out few, very few tests.
The only region that moves differently is the Veneto, who immediately applied the “swab train” rule. Translated: screen as many citizens as possible to contain the infection. Today’s numbers tell us that the Venetian strategy was successful. So one wonders: why didn’t the government immediately adopt it? The reasons are at least two. The first is of a “political” nature: at first, to avoid Italy being designed as the great lazaretto in Europe, it was preferred to “see” less contagion. The second is practical: the belpaese was not (and is not) equipped to do many swabs how many would need it. Say that it is the same Ministry of Health, which in a circular dated April 3 certifies the “deficiencies in the availability of reagents necessary for the execution of these tests” and suggests giving priority to some more exposed categories (hospitalized health workers). , the elderly), isolating “all other individuals with symptoms”, but without subjecting them to “additional tests”. That is, leaving them in uncertainty. Meanwhile, however, the virus circulates. Infect. And it kills.
