In the end he did too. Like so many star virologist colleagues, too Andrea Crisanti he succumbed to the lure of literature. But his is a different book than that of the various Viola, Burioni, Bassetti, Gismondo and company singer. In the meantime, it’s a question and answer booklet. Who dreams of being (unsuccessfully) a sort of letter to the Italians. But above all that it gives us fiery judgments on the Italian management of the virus. Crisanti has some for the Cts, for directors of Hope, for the minister himself, for the government that did not listen to him. And then the regions, the politicians, the media. “Instead of protecting healthcare personnel, for weeks (…) we left hospitals without the most basic protective devices,” he says. “We sent the infected to the RSA, we did not organize testing and tracing chains”. A sentence that dismantles months of Conte and Speranza’s rhetoric on the “Italian model” of response to the pandemic.
The highlight day
The most interesting idea is on page 80. Asks Michele Mezza: could we have limited the damage? Yes, replies the microbiologist of the “Vo ‘Method”. It would have been enough “to do the right things in a timely manner” in the week “which runs from 22 to 29 February 2020”. “Right things” that the Count bis did not realize. These are the days of aperitifs on the Zingaretti canal. The stammering of the opposition. Of the appeals “Milan and Bergamo do not stop”. These are the days when “all the political forces and the media” compete “to minimize the gravity of the situation”. “Just in that week – writes Crisanti – on February 27, the Veneto Region published on its website the results of the sampling of the population of Vo ‘: 88 infected or 3.1% of the infected population. It seemed like a small thing to everyone, but it was enormous ”. Understanding this would have made it possible to “close the two Regions, as I declared unheard in an interview the same day at Newspaper“. That data, however, was “ignored”.
Lack of transparency
Whose fault is it? That the government of the time hesitated is now well known. This is demonstrated by the red areas that have been postponed. The soldiers sent to Bergamo and left to rest in the hotel. But also the overall lack of preparation of a system which, as the minutes of the task force reveal, preferred to invest energy in a “secret plan” rather than apply the existing one. Not to mention the lack of transparency of the dicastery. “Many decisions – he says Chrysants – have been taken or have not been taken without publicly sharing the reasons, without explaining them to the Italians. Let us not forget that a sentence by the Council of State was needed to make public the ‘secret’ minutes of the Scientific technical committee (Cts). Clearly transparency is not in the DNA of our politicians and administrators ”. Hope in the first place.
The asymptomatic chaos
Then there is the asymptomatic chaos to consider. Do you remember? Experts of Hope between January and February are skeptical about the role of those without symptoms. On 6 February, for example, the ISS reported to the minister that “there is no transmission of the virus before the onset of symptoms”. Only Ruocco on February 12 reports that “not to notify them would be very serious”. And for some time their role is underestimated. “The asymptomatic people were initially ignored, let’s say until the end of March, and then marginalized as objects to be searched for and fenced off – recalls Criasnti – In a CTS report of the last week of February it is recommended not to do tests to look for asymptomatic contacts because in this way creates confusion and alarmism ”. A black hole in which many have fallen, including scientists “perched on Chinese orthodoxy” convinced that “asymptomatic people do not exist and if they exist they do not transmit”. They were wrong.
The corner of Ricciardi
“We did not want to believe – continues Crisanti – that a large percentage of the infected did not develop symptoms, but was perfectly capable of infecting them. Nobody for weeks and weeks wanted to believe it ”. Yet the data from the small village on the Euganean Hills suggested precisely the central role of asymptomatics in the spread of the pandemic. When Zaia decided to swab everyone, and not just the symptomatic ones as foreseen by the WHO and the government, he was put on the index by Rome. “I remember it was said that Vo ‘sampling was a waste of public money,” says Criasanti. Walter Ricciardi, having listened to Speranza’s adviser, one day said: “The strategy of the Veneto was not correct because it derogated from the scientific evidence”. He, too, had messed up great.
Cts rejected
You will say: but how is it possible that a whole pool of scientists managed, according to Crisanti, to be so wrong? “Our CTS – the microbiologist accuses in the book – has been dominated by health and clinical skills not really focused on epidemiology and microbiology. At that time, knowledge and experience from the fields of genetics and ecology were completely absent. And therefore the assessments made have been affected ”. As if to say: we relied on the wrong people. For heaven’s sake, even Crisanti has made some mistakes in recent months, albeit gross. But this time he may be right: in the management of the pandemic “gross errors and contrary to all common sense have been made”.
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