Others 336 deaths for Coronavirus since yesterday, +10.386 cases and 154 new admissions to intensive care: this is the daily balance according to the latest bulletin of Civil Protection. “Today’s data is in line with what we’ve been recording for weeks,” he says a Open Giorgio Sestili, physicist and founder of the blog giorgiosestili.it. “The positive cases a week ago were pretty much the same, that is 10.630, and also the number of tampons is similar to that of last Tuesday, about 274 thousand. In general this situation of stabilization is confirmed, which has been going on for about 4 weeks “.
“For four weeks we have been recording a stabilization of infections, as well as in the number of tampons, which is more or less about 1 million 700-800 thousand per week, and infections are on average 85 thousand every week. We also record a positive trend – and this should be emphasized – both as regards hospitalizations, which are decreasing, and fortunately deaths also continue to decrease. The death curve is the one that is going down the fastest at the moment, although we must emphasize that 2-300 there are still too many a day. If we settle on about 10-15mila positive per day, sooner or later the death curve will begin to decline ».
New hypotheses lockdown?
I virology italiani they divide among those who invoke a new one lockdown and those who want less burdensome measures. «My proposal is first of all to abolish this word – continues Sestili – because lockdown it is something very specific that we experienced in March and April last year when it was even forbidden to leave the house. I propose to abolish this word because it shifts the debate to opposing factions that in my opinion make no sense to exist. At this moment we have to deal with a new scenario: that of variants. Variants that have now been scientifically proven to be more contagious than the previous ones ».
For Sestili it would be necessary to adapt the 21 parameters of the Ministry of Health to make the regions change color more easily, lowering the threshold of RT. “As regards the red areas at the same time one could act on the incidence of positive cases, or rather on the number of positive cases in relation to the population. The alarm threshold at the moment is about 100 positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants: even this threshold could be lowered precisely to deal with a more contagious virus in general. If you facilitate the transition of a region from a low-risk area to a high-risk area, it means having more restrictive measures but not reaching a lockdown generalized of the whole nation “.
English variant: “In a month and a half it will be dominant”
The challenge therefore is to face the new variants such as the so-called English variant whose contagiousness, as Sestili recalls, «can vary from one 30 yet 50% in addition, which are relevant figures because within an exponential dynamics of virus transmission, greater contagiousness of this type greatly affects the number of infections in the short term and therefore also in the long term on lethality, even if on the greater lethality of the virus and the English variant there are still no certain studies ».
In fact, the English variant should soon become dominant. «From the data we have available it seems that in Great Britain the English variant, which was discovered in September, took a couple of months, perhaps at most three, to become dominant. I think it is reasonable to think that the same can happen in Italy. We are currently around 20% nationwide, but already some provinces are around 50%- 60%. With the current rate of reproduction, within a month or a month and a half the English variant could be dominant, if not throughout the country at least in many, many areas ».
