Delta variant, Galli: “Worrying but unlikely autumn like 2020”

The aggressive Delta variant will soon dominate, but a pandemic resurgence of the size of the past is unlikely to repeat itself in terms of deaths and serious illnesses. This is the opinion of Massimo Galli, head of infectious diseases at the Sacco hospital in Milan. “I tend to think that it is very unlikely that we can face a situation similar to that of last year in the autumn, despite the concerns related to the spread of the Delta variant.” This “because of the vaccine which has a series of positive aspects, which gives us a series of guarantees and which should put us in a position to be able to cope with the problem,” he told Adnkronos Salute. “But the target doesn’t even have to be dead anymore,” he specifies. For Galli “it is beyond doubt that the diffusion of the Delta variant requires us to be careful”. It is precisely because of the characteristics of the variants “that I have always maintained an attitude of strong prudence, certainly not for an ideological question, but derived from the technical-scientific elements that we could have at hand”. The pandemic, recalls the infectious disease specialist, “is always a reality in the making. But having all these people vaccinated, and the data regarding the response induced by the vaccine even against the Delta variant, makes me conclude for a ‘reasonable optimism’ and makes me say that we will not have a heavy autumn recovery “. All this, however, reiterates Galli,” does not exempt me from remembering that we must pay great attention to people, who are not few, particularly fragile, who may not have responded sufficiently to the vaccine . And that we must also continue to immunize that part of the elderly who have not been vaccinated. Not only to guarantee protection for the population, but also to guarantee individual protection as much as possible “. In short,” situations such as these must be avoided. past – warns the expert – with the need to hospitalize many people and see new bad prognoses. i that we sadly endured in recent months and last autumn, with more than 90 thousand deaths from September onwards. This shouldn’t happen anymore. But the goal is no longer dead – he repeats – And to reach it you need to secure those who have not yet been and be able to follow the most fragile ones well, to understand if they are really immunized or not. And if this is not the case, we must find alternative strategies, because in the presence of a variant with this great infectious capacity, such as the Delta, there may still be cases with an inauspicious trend “.