Covid Italia, Salmaso: “Many deaths perhaps the fault of the health system”

“We don’t know enough about Covid deaths.” For the epidemiologist Stefania Salmaso, “we should have further information, know the comorbidities, the timing of hospitalization, eligibility for therapeutic treatments, in short, if there is room for improvement in the terrible load of daily fatal cases”. In an interview with the Press, according to the former director of the National Epidemiology Center of the Higher Institute of Health, the motivation that the many deaths are due to the fact that Covid is particularly perfidious to the elderly and frail “is not enough to explain the frequency of deaths. There could be some inefficiency in the health system, I am thinking for example of the quantification of the amount preventable with antivirals within five days of infection. While vaccines are offered to all, these drugs are at risk of inequality and we need a campaign on the issue involving general practitioners ”. “Each country counts the deaths differently – continues Salmaso – difficult to make comparisons, but it is necessary to work on it. Beyond this, in Italy it should be possible to know the age, region and place of deaths. It would be useful for prevention. It is complicated to collect these data. The Higher Institute of Health tries to do this, but it is difficult without an integrated digitized system. The regions, coordinated by the Ministry of Health, should collaborate in an information system linked with hospitals, family doctors and analysis laboratories. fight the new pandemics with the tools of the last century. We also see it from the difficulty of the ASL to control isolation and quarantine, which should be automated “. As for the role of CTS, ISS and various virologists, according to the epidemiologist,” the plurality of voices it helps. However, I have often noticed a communication in which the reasons for the choices are not highlighted. When the CTS formulates its recommendations, the data are not available on which they are based, nor summaries of the discussions. Likewise, the government does not indicate how much of the decisions taken are due to scientific evidence and how much to assessments of operational feasibility ”. “The abolition of the quarantine for contacts vaccinated with three doses of positives – he continues – for example, is understandable pragmatically, but is based on limited scientific data. We are in a growth phase and it will take at least two weeks to understand. Infections are important because they are predictive of hospitalizations and deaths. As well as the number of unvaccinated. The obligation of the vaccine for the over 50s serves to protect the unvaccinated, who more than others risk ending up in intensive care, being hospitalized and even infected. It is the category that fills the hospitals and makes the regions change color, making everyone’s life worse. As for the bet on the reopening of schools, I hope it will work and in any case, as Draghi rightly pointed out, bars and pizzerias cannot be kept open by closing schools, especially with ample evidence of the inequalities and psychological damage it causes “.