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There is a slowdown in some data that must be confirmed: the light at the end of the tunnel of the second wave was turned on on Saturday by Franco Locatelli, president of the Higher Health Council. The expert, who had the support of colleagues Brusaferro and Rezza and who daily monitors Covid data in Italy, pointed out that in recent days a couple of indicators (for example, hospitalizations in intensive care or the Rt index) have shown braking signs. Is this a sign that the efforts of the last few weeks are beginning to pay off? And in the babel of numbers, how to orient yourself to trace a path of contagion? The most optimistic forecasts say that the peak in Italy will be reached at the end of November, the WHO also warns today that the wave will be long. Here, then, is a sort of report card of the indicators that are performing well and those that are not yet showing signs of abating. At least in Italy.
Total cases
The total number of new cases stands out every day at the head of the Civil Protection bulletin, which occupies the headlines of newspapers and bulletins. But at the same time a difficult figure to read, conditioned by the number of swabs processed daily. In the last week it has gone from 32,614 new infected on November 8 to 37,255 on Saturday 14; between the increase to 40,902 on Friday. The curve continues to climb but it would appear to be less steep. It is better to take into account the percentage of positive mattresses out of the total, a figure that remains far from the optimal level: in the last week it has remained around 15%, with a peak of 16.2 on November 12 and a Very different situation depending on the area (in some Lombard provinces the index is higher than 20). The objective to be achieved is to expect a 10% relaxation of the measures before Christmas.
The deaths
The second data on which the attention of public opinion is called are deaths, also because it is not subject to the variable number of tampons: deaths were 331 on November 8, going to 636 four days later. This is the worst figure of the second wave, although far from the 956 deaths recorded on March 29, the blackest day of the entire pandemic. In the last two days, the curve has been reversed, reaching the 544 victims in Saturday’s bulletin. There is still little left to chart a clear trend. However, the general mortality is less severe from the summer. The Superior School of Economics and Management (Altems) of the Cattolica in Milan reports that on October 11 there were 10.17 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants; in March this index stood at 32. The same group of experts calculated a fatality rate of 2.5% in the week between October and November, compared to 1.4% the previous week but 8.28 in the first April.
The Rt
The Rt index (that is, the number of people infected on average by each individual patient in a given time window) has a decisive weight in facilitating or aggravating containment measures. And one of the numbers that, according to the Higher Institute of Health, is showing signs of improvement. In mid-October there was talk of a Rt of 1.72 (but in Piedmont and Lombardy it was 2), today it dropped to 1.4-1.5 according to the monitoring of the Ministry of Health. There is still a long way to go: to avoid the confinement and return to the minimum of normal, it is necessary to bring the RT below 1.
Intensive therapy
A very complex interpretation is that of hospitalizations in intensive care: if in October the balance between new hospitalizations and discharges exceeded + 140 per day, little by little we are witnessing a slowdown to +60 on Friday. On Saturday the figure rose above 100. Ideally, it would keep intensive care positions below 30% of the total, but this figure has long been exceeded. The Agenas (national health services agency) reported on Friday that we had more than 40 (30,914 occupied beds out of 62,370 available) with a terrible 97% in the province of Bolzano.
Total hospitalizations
Finally, the aforementioned Altems report calculates the total number of hospitalized patients (intensive and ordinary therapies) over the resident population. This index spoke of 54.78 cases per 100,000 inhabitants on April 4, up to 1.24 on August 1. Now the indicator is calculated for each region: Lombardy has reached a peak of 131 hospitalizations per 100,000 inhabitants, Valle d’Aosta 145. Therefore, the pressure on the hospital system remains very high.
November 15, 2020 (change November 15, 2020 | 11:04)
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