“I believe that the goal is to live with the virus, and living together also means reviewing and reevaluate the rules in case of positives without symptoms. I certainly foresee that in the next few days there may be a reduction in isolation for those who are positive and have no symptoms. After that, the next step I think is to consider the hypothesis, in case of positives without symptoms, of delete the quarantine“.
The Undersecretary of Health said so Andrea Costaspeaking at Agorà on Rai 3, adding that “otherwise, with all these positives, the risk is to find ourselves unintentionally blocking the country again”.
With the advent of the BA.5 sub-variant, the chances of getting reinfected and having a severe infection that necessitates hospitalization or causes death are increased compared to the period in which the sub-variant BA.2 was dominant. The absolute risk of serious events, however, at least for the vaccinated, remains low. This is the data that emerges from a study conducted by several Portuguese institutions coordinated by the Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge in Lisbon and published on medRxiv, a platform that makes scientific studies available before review by the scientific community. The researchers considered nearly 28,000 infections recorded in Portugal between April 25 and June 10, a period in which the country experienced a new wave of the pandemic. The first finding that emerged from the study is that with BA.5 the chances of reinfection are on average 43% higher than with BA.2. However, this result is the average of a complex puzzle in which very different conditions are now joined by vaccination status, previous infections and times elapsed since vaccination or infection. For example, the risk of new infection with BA.5 is much higher among the unvaccinated or and in those who have already had an infection after having only two doses of the vaccine (+ 70%); in those who have completed the cycle with a booster, on the other hand, the difference in risk of getting sick again is almost zero. The study also found an increased risk of hospitalization with BA.5 compared with BA.2. In this case, the differences are particularly marked in who did the booster (the difference is three times). The risk of death is also higher with BA.5. In the latter case, however, the number of deaths is so low that researchers warn that the figure has no statistical value. “Our findings suggest that increased BA.5 immune evasion could explain the increase in cases,” the researchers write. “The notable difference between BA.5 and BA.2 in risk reduction associated with booster vaccination underscores the importance of high vaccination coverage to prevent serious outcomes associated with Covid-19,” they conclude.
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