They dropped my arms, a couple of days ago, the words with which the measures planned for the restart of the school year were welcomed on Twitter by Carlo Cottarelli, economist, candidate in the next elections and editor of the Republic: “The schools reopen. Enough mask and return the classmate and classmate. Finally good news”. I therefore take advantage of this column to invite him to reflect.
Masks
That the mask at school remains only to protect people at risk and those with coughs or colds is not good news for everyone: for example, parents of fragile children, or children who have a father or mother in chemotherapy, teachers with diseases that depress their immune systems, all those who are well but are in contact with family members at risk. They are not few.
It is not enough that only them are given the opportunity to continue wearing it, because a single level of protection, inevitably imperfect, still leaves more loopholes for the virus than a collective measure, as several studies on the effectiveness of the obligation to wear a mask have shown. in the classroom in reducing diffusion and on the impact of removing it. Me too’American Academy of Pediatrics he took a clear position in favor of this measure, underlining that it does not cause any harm to the little ones.
Spacing and air purification
Bringing the counters closer together, or dusting off the double ones, on the other hand, pleases everyone and changes little in terms of safety: with a variant such as omicron BA.5 that spreads easily by aerosol, the spacing of one meter no longer makes sense. Spending from five to eight hours in the same environment without adequate air purification systems inevitably exposes everyone, pupils and teachers, to infection, if there is a contagious subject in the classroom. And even without quarantine for contacts (indeed, perhaps also for this), when teachers and pupils are in bed in a number that will make it impossible to continue the lessons, the school will still have to be closed. There is therefore a risk of obtaining exactly the outcome that we would all like to avoid, given the inalienable importance of school attendance after these two difficult years.
Back to school: masks and purifiers to avoid the new wave of Covid
by Daniela Minerva
The ministry circular on the isolation of positives
To reduce this possibility, therefore, the circular of the Ministry of Health is welcome, which reiterates the need to continue to isolate positive people, symptomatic or not, reducing the minimum period of minimum isolation from 7 to 5 days and the maximum from 21 to 14, but maintaining the need, in the first case, to have a negative test before being able to exit. Who knows if this norm, which tries to stick to scientific data, will however be maintained by the new government which will take office in the autumn, and which will have to face many other challenges, along with this one.
The pandemic, the perfect storm and the search for consensus
In fact, the perfect storm of intertwined crises that is affecting the whole world, the different parts of which are interdependent from a climatic and environmental point of view, but now also on the economic, industrial, financial and social fronts, not only Secondly, the health issue that has held sway for over two years, but above all could require other unpopular measures, such as energy rationing. In this situation, the search for consensus for all political forces is therefore more essential than ever, and to say that the pandemic is over is the easiest way to win public favor.
In fact, if there is a transversal position to all parties in this very short and polarized electoral campaign, it is precisely the removal of Covid-19 and the consequences that the error of interpreting the expression “living” with the virus “as” may have. ignore it “, or assimilate it to the flu or many other diseases that we” lived with “before 2020.
A question of numbers
In this regard, I had another discussion, in recent days, always on Twitter, with an anesthesiologist according to which the isolation for the positives should be abolished completely: let’s not go to seek and isolate all the healthy carriers of meningococcus responsible for devastating meningitis, he objected, or other potential infections, why should we care about “healthy carriers” of SARS-CoV-2? It’s true. The chances that in each class there is a healthy carrier of a bacterium capable of causing meningitis is very high, because these germs are extremely widespread and in most cases they are harmless. When they cause disease, however, the consequences can be devastating. For this reason, meningococcal vaccinations are recommended, especially for children and teenagers, which can protect them from this very rare, but very serious, eventuality.
The case of Covid-19 is similar in that in the vast majority of cases the infected, especially in children, will have no consequences, but the ease with which the virus spreads and causes disease means that the small percentage that gets sick , and the very small amount that develops serious trouble, becomes numerically much more significant than that induced by meningitis.
In 2018 and 2019, for example, the Italian Higher Institute of Health recorded respectively 170 and 190 cases of invasive meningococcal diseases in people of all ages, which, with all the most appropriate treatments, causes death in 8-14. % of cases. In general, the victims in our country are therefore less than twenty each year.
According to the Ministry of Health, in four years, from 2013 to 2016, type C meningococcus would have caused 36 deaths in Italy, less than those that Covid-19 does in half a day, in this period of late summer, with all the numbers down.
What should we expect?
So what to expect with the recovery? We can look at what happens where schools have already started again, like in the United States, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have loosened the rules. In Chicago, in one week, the cases in schools are already triple compared to last year, but even in Canada, Ontario schools already register hundreds of cases
But what are the risks for children who become infected? Hasn’t it been said that the infection does little or nothing to them? In most cases this is the case, but in England, since the beginning of the year, due to the omicron variant, with its reputation for being milder, 61 children and young people under 19 have died, almost as much as the sum of the previous two years. In Italy since the beginning of the pandemic in these age groups the victims are 73, of which about forty are aged 9 and under.
According to data from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the risk of hospitalization in pediatric age is 0.25%. Low, certainly, but that corresponds to one case out of 400: in every school complex where the infection will spread freely, some pupils will end up in hospital. In the vast majority of cases it will all end with a nasty scare, which families, however, I believe would like to avoid.
The underestimation of the health burden that the pandemic continues and will continue to have is not, however, an Italian phenomenon only, mind you. Among the large countries, only China continues undaunted to pursue its #zerocovid strategy, so much so that in recent days a new lockdown has been decided for millions of citizens as a result of the finding of a hundred cases.
A reaction that appears excessive in our eyes, and which in any case would be unsustainable for us, not only from an economic point of view, but also from a political, psychological and social point of view. Apart from deniers and minimizers who use it as a rhetorical weapon against those inviting you not to let your guard down, no one in fact anymore even takes into consideration the hypothesis of a lockdown, unless you find yourself in a situation comparable to that of spring 2020.
With the end of the pandemic emergency phase, therefore, the school starts again as usual: lack of teachers, crowded classrooms, often obsolete methods, dilapidated and sometimes frankly dangerous structures, despite the millions of euros allocated over the years for their adaptation. Indeed, there is a novelty: having not installed, except in rare cases, air purification systems, as the only measure of sure efficacy against infections, the method of wide open windows will continue to be used. The difference, compared to last year, is that this year the energy crisis is added to the pandemic: heating should be kept down, heat loss contained. How will the two indications be reconciled?
For two and a half years, a return to the “old world” has been advocated, but for this it is not enough to remove the rules added during the pandemic. The world has changed, and in another two years it will be even more so. Pretending that the school remains that of our blessed youth is not a good way to ride a constantly changing reality.