“Infections will increase in the coming weeks”

Published on: 12/20/2020 4:11 pm

“I already said that December and January will be terrible, not only will we not have a stabilization” of cases “but in the coming weeks we will have an increase.” This was stated by Walter Ricciardi, counselor of the Ministry of Health and professor of Hygiene at the Catholic University of Rome, invited to the Aria on Sunday at La7.

“The whole country must unite – said Ricciardi – this is a long war but if we don’t organize to fight it, we will lose it.” As for the usefulness of a hard closure, “in October – Ricciardi recalled – I said that if we had made selective closures and then respected the differentiated measures of the traffic light we would not have had to do a generalized closure. If the traffic light is yellow and you consider it green you can find someone to invest you, and that’s how it happened. “

Then he highlighted: “The performance anxiety of many Regions made the rule not respected, but especially the duration” of the differentiation by zone. For Ricciardi “we have to fight against three pandemics: viral, economic and mental”. Regarding the latter, he explained, “there is a Covid due to fatigue that affects 60-70% of people.”

“We,” he observed, “did very well in the first phase, where they provided us with the terrible images of the hospitals. In this second phase, people took everything out. We have the mortality and fatality rate, but above all the first, highest in the world right now. “

“To date – explained Ricciardi – out of 147 countries only 12 have done well: 10 are Asian and 2 are Australia and New Zealand, where Christmas is usually celebrated right now. The 10 Asians have continuously tracked, Australia and New Zealand Zealand has had a very early lockdown for a short period, while all the other countries in the world have lagged behind and done very little, such as the United States, Britain and Brazil. ” .

And regarding the Covid variant and Italy’s decision to suspend flights with Great Britain, Ricciardi noted: “Closing flights with the UK is a good measure if all other countries do so. As in the first phase. If only you do it, you don’t have to, you have to do it all over Europe. With the new variant the virus infects better but it is no longer bad, “explained Ricciardi.” For now, these three mutations close to the peak protein do not seem to alter the protective capacity of the vaccine “but it is clear that we must continue to monitor” the situation.