Finding the truth is difficult. We need to take a step back, or maybe more than one. They are in the days of late February, when Northern Italy is facing the first coronavirus outbreaks. The eyes of Palazzo Chigi and the Ministry of Health are focused on a dozen municipalities in the Lodigiano area and on a village in the province of Padua, Vo’ Euganeo. That’s where Adriano Trevisan comes from, a 78-year-old retiree from Padua, originally from Monselice. He was hospitalized in the intensive care of the Schiavonia hospital but the doctors who were treating him could not do anything to save him. His condition immediately appeared critical. On the evening of February 21 (it was not yet 11pm) he took his last breath. From that moment on, the contagion curve, in Lombardy and Veneto, will start to rise dramatically. Up to a certain point they will go hand in hand, then the curves will recede. The Region led by the governor Luca Zaia, blatantly breaking with the government’s guidelines, will undertake an aggressive policy to stem the infections. A line that will see its cornerstone in the tracking of infections through nasopharyngeal swabs.
Who is behind this line is now impossible to say. At first Andrea Crisanti, professor of Microbiology at the University of Padua, had taken all the credit. He had even been renamed the “dad” of the Vo ‘model. Definition that made the leaders of the Region nervous. As we had already written on the Giornale.it last May, an internal struggle has been going on in Veneto healthcare for months to attribute the merits of a miracle (recognized all over the world) which not only immediately curbed the spread of infections but had even freed the entire “red zone” on Euganean Hills from the nightmare of the coronavirus. “The merit goes to my team – Zaia has always wanted to reiterate – Crisanti came later”. As later reconstructed in Coronavirus Black Book, now already at the first reprint (click here), the discontent of the experts led by the director general Domenico Mantoan has deep roots, at least since the virologist who arrived from Imperial College London began to be omnipresent on newspapers, talk shows and radio broadcasts. “We had been ready for a month thanks to the doctor Francesca Russo, a woman from Catania who heads the Prevention Department “, leaked months ago from the entourage of the Northern League governor.
To overflow a jar already filled with resentment was a study recently appeared in the scientific journal Nature. It was signed by Crisanti, accused of having attributed the paternity of the strategy used to “buffer” all Vo ‘and then applied by Zaia throughout the region. Faced with what many have experienced as an affront, Russo took a pen and paper and wrote to Nature to tell another version of the facts. In the letter, which Bruno Vespa reported in his book Because Italy loved Mussolini (Mondadori), no half terms are used: “The publication altered the facts, distorting reality and mystifying what happened to Vo ‘. All the relevant decisions on how to deal with the outbreak originated from the Schiavonia hospital, where the first two patients residing in Vo’ were hospitalized. positive for Sars-CoV-2, and were hired by the President of the Veneto Region in agreement with the Prevention and Public Health Department of the Region and with the health authorities of the Ulss 6 Euganea Company. All this – he therefore specified – it happened even before Vo ‘studio was conceived “. Indeed, the director of the Prevention Department recalled that “the swabs began after the hospital had already been evacuated and after the isolation and lockdown of the Municipality of Vo ‘was ordered” is that “the lockdown was still in progress at the time of the second sampling”.
A real media bomb. For Russo, in fact, many of the facts reported in Crisanti’s research (paid by Zaia with an allocation of 150 thousand euros) would not correspond to the truth. To begin with, it would not be true that two surveys were conducted on the residents of Vo ‘less than two weeks apart in order to investigate the exposure of the population to Covid-19 before and after the lockdown. How would that not be true study “guided the strategy adopted by the Veneto Region” and what then “this strategy of testing and tracing had a significant impact on the course of the epidemic in Veneto compared to other Italian regions “. “The case of Vo ‘- is the final thrust of Russo – had a minimal strategic impact on the approach of the Veneto Region in dealing with theepidemic, since it counts, so far, only 5 deaths and 83 positive cases in the municipality while other outbreaks have simultaneously broken out in much larger communities and the testing and tracing was already in place “.
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