Ricciardi: “Did I lose face? With lockdown 70 thousand deaths were avoided”

“Some say he lost his face because things are better today, but how can you tell? 70 thousand people died in the second wave, if we had made a lockdown in October and then in February we would have avoided these deaths. 130,000 died, 60,000 in the first wave and 70,000 in the second. Let’s not joke! They are destroyed families, elderly people who have left us, the memory of the country. And there are media that scotomize all this “. This was stated by Walter Ricciardi, full professor of General and Applied Hygiene at the Catholic University and scientific advisor to the Minister of Health, protagonist of a special lesson of the new master in Health Communication of the Catholic University, entitled ‘Communicating health during the pandemic. Truth, fake news and information ethics’. “In one week in Great Britain the Indian variant has become predominant, reaching 75% of infections. The problem is that it finds a substrate of people who are not extraordinarily protected but only mildly because they have chosen to make a first dose of vaccine at all. Thus contagions begin to emerge in those who are vaccinated. This tells us how at the beginning Great Britain, which seemed to have emerged from a difficult situation with good results, risks finding itself in a compromised situation after a month . Political choices must be supported by scientific evidence “, he added. In recent months” I have decided to speak only with Minister Speranza to advise the Government and write about ‘Avvenire’ – explained Ricciardi – There is no possibility of exit from the pandemic without the intervention of governments and collaboration between states. There are those who have managed the emergency well with timely lockdowns and the blocking of mobility that prevents and the virus to move because it is carried by people. A virtuous example was New Zealand, which also did well in communicating with the population. The prime minister was often on television explaining what was happening. ”