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Editorial Board
22 December 2020 05:35
There are 44,000 Italians who returned from the UK in two weeks to be found and tested for the hyssop. Then your contacts will be tracked. The operation is planned by the ordinance of the Ministry of Health that has closed connections with Great Britain and will serve to prevent the new variant of the coronavirus from circulating in Italy.
New variant of the coronavirus: the hunt for the 44 thousand Italians who returned from the United Kingdom
For now there are only two positive cases of the new English variant: it is a woman who is an intelligence officer in Aise’s service and is married to an Englishman who is currently also positive. The government has decided to block flights to and from Italy, but also to bar entry on trains and other means of transport to those who “stayed or transited in the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the fourteen days prior to this ordinance. And Ireland. from North “. Repubblica writes today that based on an estimate obtained by crossing data provided by major airports, the number of scheduled flights coming in from Great Britain and the average capacity of aircraft (almost all Airbus A320-A321 and Boeing 737) are at least 31 thousand passengers, returning with direct flights from the United Kingdom between December 6 and 21, who must undergo molecular testing as soon as possible – according to an ordinance of the Ministry of Health. Meanwhile, there are some suspicious cases:
For now in Italy there is an established case (Patient 1) and a very probable one (the English partner). Then some fifteen presumptive positive swabs from people who have returned from England are analyzed in these hours, one in Spallanzani in Rome, 7 in Naples, one in Trieste, two in Bari, five in Palermo.
As for the first Italian case, the mutation found in the virus genome so far has only been verified in women, who have a high viral load. Precisely this condition would have helped geneticists at the Celio military hospital – where the two were subjected to swabs – to sequence the genome with the variant found in recent weeks in Great Britain a week ago. However, the hypothesis is maintained that it was the colleague who transmitted it to him – who after being an MI6 official now works in a bank – returned to Rome from the United Kingdom in recent days and landed at Fiumicino airport. For now, the two are isolated at home, but in the meantime the tracking protocol has been activated: relatives and close contacts have been tracked and notified during these hours and they have also received prophylaxis with buffer and isolation. The objective is to prevent the spread in our country of the new variant, which would no longer be lethal or more resistant to vaccines, but according to initial information it could spread more quickly.
Self-certification, travel and the red zone: what happens from December 24
Italians returned from Britain and the English variant of the coronavirus
The Corriere della Sera reports today that in Milan Malpensa and Linate the management company Sea announces that some 9 thousand people have disembarked from London alone in the last fourteen days. To these must be added the approximately 7,000 travelers who, according to Aeroporti di Roma, arrived in Fiumicino and Ciampino with flights taking off from all over the United Kingdom.
It is an accounting – those responsible for the airport clarify – that does not take into account those who landed in our territory stopping at the hubs of other European countries (France, Holland, Germany) for convenience or because that double flight was the only possible solution to arrive to the Italian destination.
However, this could complicate the identification of the 44,000 Italians. Meanwhile, there are thousands of blocked compatriots asking to be allowed to return to the Farnesina after having done the swab. “We wait for information in a hotel room at Heathrow – explain two boys to the Corriere -, we have no home here”. All await repatriation flights. From Alitalia they say they are ready to operate them. They are waiting, as during the first wave, for a signal from the government.
Meanwhile, Pfizer and Moderna are testing their vaccines on the English variant of the coronavirus. “Based on the data obtained to date, we expect that the immunity induced by the Moderna vaccine will protect against recently discovered variants in the UK. We will do further testing in the coming weeks to confirm these expectations,” Moderna said in a statement. Additionally, Pfizer reports that it is studying the response of immunized people to the new strain of the virus. PfizerBionTech and Moderna are the only two vaccines licensed to date in the United States. The virus has mutated before, and both companies have said their sera have also been shown to be effective against these new variants.
