Covid Italia, Sestili: “At Christmas 30 thousand cases a day and deaths doubled”

Italy risks 20-30 thousand covid infections a day at Christmas and 800 deaths a week. This is the scenario proposed by the physicist Giorgio Sestili who has been analyzing and monitoring the Sars-CoV-2 epidemic since the beginning of the pandemic. “The epidemic, as the Rt value still above 1 indicates, is growing,” he told Adnkronos Salute. “But the transmissibility index touched its highest value (1.3) on October 22-23 and then slowly started to go down. We must see the glass half full: we are not observing a wave with an exponential trend in infections, as in the past, and with monstrous times of doubling of cases. This growth, although not alarming (30% more cases in the last week, 16% more intensive care, and 8% more deaths) if we are projecting to Christmas, and if the trend is confirmed, it could lead to 20-30 thousand cases and a doubling of deaths, going from the current 400 per week to 800 “, he observes. Sestili points out that this projection “has room for error” and according to the physicist, creator of the Facebook page ‘Coronavirus – Scientific data and analysis’, on the web with its own website www.giorgiosestili.it, “the interventions that the Government is evaluating could lower the infections, for example by also intervening on the risks due to gatherings for the holidays “, Sestili hypothesizes. Could Italy ‘resist’ compared to the fourth wave that is raging in the rest of Europe? “We are witnessing an important lesson – replies the physicist – With the Delta variant you cannot afford to vaccinate under 90% of citizens, what is happening in France and in Germany is just that: they immunized 10% less than Italy that has reached around 85% of the population. But, and epidemiologists have now agreed, with this variant 90% of immunizations must be exceeded. So – he concludes – we are a little better but it is not necessarily enough. The WHO and the European Commission have both agreed that we are facing an epidemic of unvaccinated “.