Covid Italy and new coronavirus wave, what is happening? The experts speak

The data of the latest ISS report on Covid in Italy speak for themselves: Rt, incidence and hospitalizations are increasing. What is happening on the front of coronavirus infections and what autumn and winter await us? Experts warn: the wave will last until Christmas. Read also “The stratification of the effects of the anti-Covid vaccination campaign has somehow covered up to now the weakest and most fragile, but now we are seeing the effects of an openness tout court. Cases are rising, but fortunately it has also changed the pathological expression of the virus thanks to vaccines. Although we have understood that we will live with Sars-CoV-2, prudential attitudes would be necessary. We will see this positive trend of growth until after Christmas, with the addition of the overlap with a flu that in the last two years it had collapsed, thanks to the widespread use of masks, and which today is frightening “Alessandro Vergallo, national president of the Italian hospital anesthetists association (Aaroi-Emac), told Adnkronos Health, commenting on the monitoring data of the control room Iss-Ministry of Health, which still record an increase in the incidence and in ordinary hospitalizations and in intensive care. According to the anesthesiologists, “this wave will have an impact on the whole NHS, we already see that in some hospitals a slight increase in positive health workers is reported – he notes – and this means that some departments and services are affected, with a performance situation. not Covid which has yet to be recovered. An additional problem for the hospital organization “.” A new pandemic wave is starting which unfortunately will find Italians largely unprepared because many, especially the elderly, have not vaccinated themselves with the fourth dose and therefore of fact they are not protected against serious illness “says Walter Ricciardi, professor of Hygiene at the Catholic University of Rome, guest of Rai Radio 1. As to who should take the fourth dose, Ricciardi clarifies that” it would be appropriate for everyone to do it, but to frail subjects by age or pathology is really a question of survival “. But will mortality also increase? “Certainly – he replies – less than 30% of those over 80 are vaccinated with the fourth dose”. Does the situation of the variants worry? “Omicron still dominates – warns Ricciardi – but there are sub-variants and one has the advantage of 10%, which means that it has a little more contagiousness”. How will the impact of the regrowth of cases be on hospitals? “It will not be the dramatic one of the past years, but it will surely have a strong impact. It is a wave, not a tsunami”, he concludes. “I really hope that the risk of a serious winter wave of Sars-CoV-2 infections – which I think there will certainly be – will be dealt with by those in charge and with judgment, who will manage health issues in the incipient Meloni government” is the hope expressed by Guido Silvestri, a lecturer in the US at Emory University in Atlanta who urges people to come back to life, confident that the answer to Covid is clear and consists of a few precise moves. For Silvestri “the idea of ​​indefinitely erasing human sociality to stop a respiratory virus will go down in history as one of the most sensational nonsense ever born from the human mind”, he comments on Facebook, referring to positions expressed by those he defines “catastrophists, closers, pseudo-experts “, and so on. “When I see the world becoming ‘social’ again – while certain illiterates of virology and good manners continue to rave about their Twitter bubbles, the final scene of ‘Finding Nemo’ comes to mind”, the animated film for children, “in which the heroic little fish, free but packed in Sydney Harbor, ask themselves: ‘what happens now?’. When it comes to Covid, the answer is simple: we vaccinate ourselves with booster doses as recommended by the experts, we focus early prevention and therapy on high-risk subjects, and we return to swim, with serene optimism, in the great ocean of life “, he concludes.