Living with Covid: the imperative of the second phase of the pandemic has now taken hold in Italy and a circular from the Ministry of Health published yesterday has effectively cleared what is perhaps the greatest management revolution since the beginning of the pandemic: those hospitalized in hospital that will only have a positive swab, but that do not clearly manifest the symptoms of Covid, can be accommodated in the wards connected to their pathology. And no longer in the areas dedicated to covid patients.
The new protocol was pushed in particular by the vice president of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Walter Riccardi. It was the directors of the health authorities who had asked not to send hospitals into a tailspin by admitting any positive patient to Pulmonology.
How will the new hospital protocol work? Starting from the emergency room where swabs are performed, patients who are only positive but without the symptoms of Covid will no longer be “surgically isolated” from other patients but sent to the relevant department, however, identifying rooms dedicated to positives. A sort of bubble inside the ward.
However, hospitals – but also other services such as sanitation and transport – are once again experiencing a lack of staff due to the high number of positives, forced to home even if asymptomatic. In fact, we are faced with a new disease, with severe Covid pneumonia practically gone, but with coronavirus infections that can make fragile patients particularly exposed to the risks of the virus.
The new challenge now concerns the revision of the surveillance system – always pushed by the Friulian vice president Walter Ricciardi – with the stop to mass tampons, to focus instead on fragile and super-symptomatic. An initial response arrives today from Rome with the Undersecretary of Health Andrea Costa who supports the motion to “free” the asymptomatic. “This wave, given, like all the previous ones, will be self-limiting. By the end of the month we will reach the peak and then the infections will return to decline, as is already happening in countries, such as Portugal, hit before Italy by this upsurge”, Costa explains, adding that “the real lockdown will be risked if we do not start a serious reflection on the elimination of the isolation of asymptomatic positives”
“We must start from the awareness that zero contagion is not feasible and that the only solution is coexistence with the virus. At the moment, therefore, there is no restrictive measure on the table of the Government. I believe it is wrong to argue, however. , that the Government is not intervening, considering that we have never let our guard down or stopped monitoring the situation. In this direction we are proceeding with the second recall for the over 80s and as soon as possible, in agreement with Ema and Aifa, we he is evaluating an expansion of the audience up to the age of sixty “Costa comments.