The hunt for the virus has resumed. But this time it’s about the common, so to speak, flu virus. Or at least, one of the three strains that normally infect humans.
In particular, yet another alarm has been triggered throughout the peninsula. Reading the Milanese page of the Republic, we seem to have returned to the “glories” of the first months of the coronavirus pandemic: “The flu hits hard and these are intense days for doctors and hospital emergency room services, some even clogged and with doctors struggling to manage all patients. After that in a week almost 138,000 citizens of Lombardy have had the fluAts Milano enhances the service of the single numbers 116 and 117. More than 130 children arrive at Niguarda a day, 144 accesses to the emergency room of the Buzzi children’s hospital in 24 hours, compared to the ordinary 40 “.
However the title of the article itself signals some sort of heterogeneity of ends precisely in relation to the anti-Covid measures generated precisely by an excess of alarmism: “Influenza, the Banderali pediatrician: in two years of Covid, children have not gotten sick, that’s why now they have the lowest defenses”.
A thesis that obviously literally clashes with the phobic line of the so-called virus free carried out throughout the pandemic. A line that is even taken up in many advertisements, which emphasize the paradigm of a family life conducted in safety within perfectly sanitized environments. “Since the children didn’t get sick for two years, they now have a lack of antibodies against these classic diseases,” explains Dr. Banderali. “In 2020 with schools closed and the distance learning all the children were at home and compared to 60, 70 or 80 daily accesses now, we had ten at this time. Now with the resumption of coexistence with each other, the children are back to falling ill as in the pre-pandemic phase”.
On the other hand, the knots of human follies always come home to roost, as in the case of its management pandemic nothing short of schizophrenic, in which the ancient relationship between the population, especially that of school age, and seasonal viruses. A relationship that had its cornerstone in the great diffusion of the same viruses in young people, whose immunization through mild disease has always represented a great safety factor for the whole of society. The virologist Ilaria Capua, before being sucked like many others into the vortex of viral terror, explained this defense mechanism of the human species very clearly, calling it the red light effect.
Well, having adopted unprecedented health restrictions – let’s think of the mandatory masks even outdoors, of distance learning without equal in the West, of the isolation of simple positive swabs and so on – today nature takes the bill, making us find a youth not only weakened on the level of sociality and teaching, but also on the immune system.
Yet among the most orthodox Covid doctors there is someone who calls for the return of the masks to cope with the flu wave, demonstrating that he had learned nothing from the three-year experience.
In this sense, the opinion decidedly against the return of the gag against the flu expressed by the infectious disease specialist is illuminating Matthew Bassetti: “Someone says let’s put the masks back on, I say absolutely not. These microorganisms must circulate and have always circulated, we must protect ourselves but how? For example, we have lost a lot of coverage for pneumococcus, pneumonia vaccination but also flu vaccination. Today the incidence is highest among young children, but where the adults and then the grandparents will arrive. Will the former lose a few days of school but will the grandparents end up in the hospital? The elderly – suggests Bassetti in conclusion – in these two weeks that separate us from Christmas instead of rushing to get presents, run to get the flu vaccine. “
So, the road is always the same as it used to be: protect the fragile and let the virus circulate among the healthy population. If, on the contrary, the same bankruptcy anti-Covid philosophy were to prevail also with regard to the seasonal flu, many more would be added to the colossal damages produced so far.
Claudio Romiti, 4 December 2022