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In the last seven days in Italy, almost 151 thousand cases of coronavirus infection have been verified, 79% more than the previous seven days. For the fourth week in a row, registered infections increase dramatically, although the rate, taking the data from Friday to Thursday as a reference, has slowed somewhat: the increase was 106% two weeks ago and 95%. last week.
The number of positive cases in itself is concerning mainly because it has already far exceeded what the systems of contact tracking regional manage to manage. For each of the 20-25,000 positives discovered each day, in fact, ASLs must reconstruct an average of 15-20 contacts to stay low, to be immediately placed in isolation to stop the potential outbreak. This is not the case practically anywhere: there are fewer and fewer reconstructed contacts, because contact trackers are no longer able to perform the necessary epidemiological investigations on all newly infected, with the result that we no longer have the spread of the virus.
– Read also: Contact tracing no longer works
The last weekly report of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità was published last Friday and refers to the previous week, which is the one that in the previous graph goes from October 9 to 15. It is, therefore, a phase that has now been overtaken by events and that has worsened drastically, but which continues to be very worrying. He says that even then only one in four positive cases had been discovered through the contact tracking, while a third was confirmed by the appearance of symptoms. For the first time in months, the number of known outbreaks had decreased, but not because they were fewer, but because we could no longer identify them. In fact, 44% of the cases reported in that week were not linked to known transmission chains.
Two weeks later, the situation has not shown signs of improvement: we know how a minority of those who are positive are contagious and this greatly complicates the work of politicians and administrators who must decide what restrictive measures to take to contain infections. The warnings of the ISS were very clear already a week ago: the data point to “the criticality of the territorial services” and the “imminent achievement of critical thresholds of the assistance services in various regions.”
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The number of weekly deaths continues to rise: last week it more than doubled, this week slightly less (there was a 94% increase). As many expected, it followed the trend of infections a couple of weeks late.
The number of people admitted to intensive care is currently 1,651, a figure far removed from the more than 4,000 of the worst phase of the first wave but which has increased worryingly 66% compared to last week. However, the national figure only tells part of the story: some regions are, in fact, much better equipped than others in hospital resuscitation rooms.
– Read also: Immuni is not working, but it could
In Lombardy, due to the large investments in hospitals in the last twenty years and due to the intensity of the first wave, the preparation is much higher than in other regions. In Umbria, the percentage of patients with Covid exceeded 50% of intensive care settings, reaching an alarming level and well above the threshold considered critical of 30%. Threshold surpassed by Valle d’Aosta, Tuscany and Campania, and almost reached also in Lombardy and in the province of Bolzano.
Another data that continues to give bad indications is the positivity rate of the tampons: that is, how many are positive out of the total of those made. It is a partial indicator, and should not be taken as an absolute parameter to assess the progress of the epidemic and the health of monitoring: but it is still important and its average trend indicates several things.
– Read also: Swab positivity rate explained
As we refocus the tests on those with symptoms, because we can no longer follow up on contacts and, therefore, asymptomatic ones, the number of positives we discovered in the total swabs increases. It has been doing this since August, but the curve has grown much more since October and has now reached 13%, up from 10% a week ago. The other thing that the trend of this indicator suggests is that the increase in cases does not depend on the increase in tests: otherwise the rate would remain constant or it would fall. These concepts and the correct way to interpret the swab positivity rate are explained in more detail here.
Lombardy is unrivaled in the absolute number of cases registered this week: they were 39,136, 96% more than last week. In absolute numbers, they are followed by Campania (16,860) and Piedmont (15,362), while in terms of the percentage increase is Emilia-Romagna, which is 98% and Tuscany, 94%.
But infections must be considered in relation to the population, and better still to the population by province. The map of cases verified in the last two weeks per 100,000 inhabitants shows that the Aosta Valley is worse than in the rest of Italy: there were 1,058. It is followed by the province of Monza and Brianza (881) and Milan (834), then Genoa (784), Varese (760), Cuneo (628), Prato (623) and Viterbo (612).
The swabs continue to grow, more than 1,221,000 in the last week, administered to almost 752,000 people who have not been tested so far.
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