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The coronavirus in the last 24 hours has infected 30 thousand people in Italy: the number of positives thus reaches 443 thousand positives today, a level never reached during the first wave. There are some indicators that suggest, however, that the virus is somehow “slowing down” its operation on the Peninsula: the increase actually seems more contained “day by day” than a week or two ago. Meanwhile, the new Dpcm has divided the regions into three bands, with relative narrowness.
Second wave: when does the descent begin?
However, it is not possible to know whether the descent should start soon. Usually the peak is reached around 60-70 days from the start and, in the specific case we are experiencing, it would be attributable to mid-September. Nothing official, just hypotheses. Lombardy, by far the most affected region, appears to be showing contained growth compared to the previous weeks. However, the descent is not yet visible.
“Daily fluctuations” in the number of infections, which “are widely expected, what we need to see is how the trend is going. And certainly in the last 3 weeks we have had an upward trend, even if in the last few days, I guess, we see some stabilization at relatively high levels, “Giovanni Rezza, director general of Prevention of the Ministry of Health, said yesterday at a press conference at the ministry. But the expert pointed out, “the number of positives on the number of buffers exceeds 10%”. So “the positivity rate is still quite high and this is not an entirely positive sign. The number of hospitalizations, even in intensive care, has tended to increase in recent days – continued Rezza – although in almost all areas” . There is still no real criticality in the country, because the number of places in intensive care has increased compared to phase 1 “of the emergency.
Covid: what Christmas 2020 awaits us?
We always return to that number of people admitted to intensive care, one of the values to watch out for more carefully. The peak of the first wave was reached between late March and early April, but the significant decline in infections that many expected did not begin immediately. It was what virologists called “the plateau paradox.” Yes, the virus was slowing down in Italy, and this was mostly confirmed by the beautiful intensive care data, but new cases continue to be identified and the plateau, “the kind of plateau that followed the peak,” held out “for a few weeks before. . a more decisive decline. The data for the second week of November will be decisive in this regard, to understand the trend of the epidemic. If the wave continues following the predictable trend, it could last until Christmas, proceeding towards a progressive decrease but nothing is you can calculate scientifically and the variables are many.
Prime Minister Conte made it clear yesterday, tougher measures today but in the hope that they can be effective even in the short term: “If we come to Christmas with some serenity, not even confidence in consumption will be depressed and we can” I see some room for recovery. I’m not thinking of a Christmas with balls and hugs. We must always follow the rules. “The picture is not promising at the moment, but the signs are in the dark. Conte sums up the following:
“The national average of the transmissibility index is 1.7. Compared with infected people, the number of asymptomatic patients increases, the number of hospitalized people decreases in percentage but there is a high probability that many regions exceed the thresholds of intensive care and medical “.
Second wave: when will we get rid of Sars-CoV-2?
Giuseppe Ippolito, scientific director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases “Spallanzani” in Rome, tries to answer, in Corriere della SeraWho asks when we will get rid of Covid? Anthony Fauci, the American virologist, has already said that we will have to deal with this pandemic for at least all of 2021 trying to keep it under control. I agree. The first vaccines and more effective treatments than the current ones, especially monoclonal antibodies, could be available between the end of this year and the beginning of next. They must then be distributed and accessible to the entire world population. An organizational and logistical task that cannot be done in a few weeks ”. Could the virus disappear forever after creating herd immunity?
“We still know little about Sars-CoV-2. We have seen that it tends not to mutate and this could be good for a vaccine, but 10 months is too short to rule out that significant mutations may take hold in the future. Immunity is the same. To date, there are few cases of reinfection, but we cannot rule out that the immunity acquired after infection may be exhausted in a few months ”.
Robert Dingwall, a professor of social sciences at Nottingham Trent University, said a few days ago to theIndependent that it is “impossible to provide a scientifically justifiable timetable” for the end of the coronavirus epidemic in the world. We simply know very little about it. Michael Head, a researcher at the University of Southampton, explains that estimates are particularly difficult because the coronavirus is a new virus, unknown until a year ago. “The difficulty with any future prediction model is that it is a completely new virus and the scale of this pandemic is unprecedented in modern memory. The extent of globalization and international connectivity is such that the ‘end’ is really difficult to predict with certainty. “The end is far away.
