Bassetti: “Outdoor masks? A must, it’s useless”

For Matteo Bassetti “outdoor masks should be removed immediately, it no longer makes sense to keep them. The obligation is taking away half of Europe and we always arrive later, last. When the French and Germans closed, here in Italy it was said that we had to close us too, and now that in France they remove the mask outdoors? The silence, we continue undaunted. The closure of the Minister of Health and his consultants is incredible “, says the director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic to Adnkronos Health of the San Martino hospital in Genoa. “Thinking that people can necessarily wear a mask outdoors with 35 degrees Celsius in some context – comments Bassetti – is wrong and not useful. The obligation must be removed now and not from July 15: we risk hurting people, people do not he can more and then if he has to go back to using it he will see this device as something imposed in an ideological way “.” The emergency situation was linked to hospital admissions, which somehow led us to block the country. Today I don’t think that there is a particularly important situation in hospitals, the Covid wards are almost deserted. Maintaining the emergency at a time when the epidemiological situation is clearly improving does not seem like a good message to the country and the world “, continues Bassetti, commenting on the controversy over the possibility of an extension of the state of emergency which should expire at the end of July. “If we have to maintain the state of emergency because we do not know how to pay the health workers hired for the pandemic, I would ask myself why we have not been able to hire them in 15 months – Attacks Bassetti – We never learn the lesson, in these months there. ‘Italy has not been able to stabilize human resources to deal with emergencies. It is not a good sign “.” We do not know much about the Russian variant, but it is almost certainly covered by vaccines. In that country this variant was created because Russians are vaccinating little and therefore the virus circulates and changes, infecting more people and growing stronger. In all countries where there has not been a strong vaccination campaign, I think of Brazil and South Africa, or where they have vaccinated little like in Russia or they have lengthened the time between the first and second dose too much, variants have come out. But we must not be afraid and terrified, these are covered by vaccines “, explains the infectious disease specialist commenting on the new variant of Sars-C oV-2 which may have emerged in Russia, where there has been a spike in new infections. “The message is always the same: monitor and sequence to discover the variants and then vaccinate the entire population with two doses”, concludes Bassetti.