The contagion curve grows but the deaths decrease. Here because

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On the one hand, the contagion curve that has begun to rise during the last 4 weeks, on the other hand the data from hospitals that photograph a situation that is completely under control. With the most difficult hospitalizations – litmus test in the key months of the epidemic when all of Italy waited with great anticipation for the Civil Protection bulletin at 6:00 p.m. – it finally returned to normality throughout the country. Has the coronavirus changed? “It is a fact that fewer people die: intensive care today from north to south adds about 70 hospitalizations, as many as the Covid ward of my hospital did when the epidemic was at its peak. Figures that as clinicians we do not even take into consideration from the point of view of health management.

“The virus has blunt weapons compared to six months ago”

This is Matteo Bassetti, director of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in Genoa. Which explains why, while it is absolutely necessary to keep the attention high to protect the most fragile people, the Sars-CoV-2 virus has blunted the guns compared to six months ago. “Why do people die less? Meanwhile – Bassetti warns – thanks to the experience in the field that we have done here in Italy, we are better at managing cases: even when a more demanding one comes to the room, the system now precise treatment protocols are executed and applied: we know how, when and in what dose to administer oxygen or cortisone. And thanks to peripheral hospitals that tend to centralize, care is optimized. ” But it is also the virus, according to the expert, which is less “bad”, and not only thanks to the age of those infected, which has dropped below 30 years according to the latest report from the Higher Institute of Health. «Young people – Bassetti warns -: we locate them thanks to an unprecedented ‘tracking’ activity that touches 100,000 tampons a day and they are generally asymptomatic or not very symptomatic. If we didn’t test them, they wouldn’t even know they have the virus. In any case, even the percentage of positivity today reaches a maximum of 2.5%, far from 30% at the end of March, when one of the three swabs was positive. And often with very different symptoms: today 90% of cases show no signs of disease.

At this stage of the epidemic, people aged 55 and over continue to reach hospitals, since at the beginning of the emergency – from this point of view there are no changes – but they are affected in another way: the virus, as shown by several Studies in the literature, including the last one led by Robert Gallo’s group and in which the epidemiologist Massimo Ciccozzi from the Biomedical Campus of Rome participated, has lost some virulence factors, to the benefit of us who host him. And the guests – Bassetti adds – are in each case more ready and protected: our work just published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine and carried out on 3,500 people who underwent the serological test between March and May in Liguria and Lombardy, excluding the areas high endemic, photographs a prevalence of 11% of a population of 12-13 million inhabitants. That is, in those areas there are already potentially 1 million people who have “manufactured” the virus and produced antibodies. Only in Savona, 25% of the population is protected and has developed resistance to Covid ”.

The reasons for the “crawl”

The tracking network that Italy has finally put in place makes it possible to intercept many more cases. As if to say: he who seeks finds. But it is not the absolute numbers that count as much as the percentage of positives in the tampons made, which is still low. So what are tampons for? The test and trace has epidemiological and preventive utility: it serves to protect the most fragile and prevent them from becoming infected. “We must continue to be cautious – remembers Bassetti – to continue down the path of the hygiene of distancing and certainly keep the places in intensive care: but we are sure that the tsunami will not repeat itself.”

Flu vaccine and sense of responsibility

There is a whole set of instruments that had to be activated in addition to testing and screening, but the clinician, who was not deployed and on whom Italy would be seriously delayed, attacked: “First of all, to avoid overlapping symptoms as much as possible. possible, it carried out a large-scale influenza campaign – warns Bassetti – that would make the quadrivalent vaccine available to everyone. It is not acceptable that today the doses are only for one in four people. And the pneumococcus is also useful, especially among adolescents. »Then, the population must be informed and” educated “:” People must understand that if they have Covid they are not ‘fried’, in fact the lethality is similar to that of many other infectious diseases, between 0, 3 and 0.7%, far from the 15% announced at that time. More than 99% of people survive Covid. On the other hand – concludes Bassetti – I will not tire of repeating that those who have symptoms, even mild, should stay at home. Students included and not only in case of fever: even for a mild cough or runny nose ».