GENOVA – With the return of the flu it will be a double virus winter season: to understand if we are affected by covid or flu, swabs with double results are also arriving in Liguria, initially only in hospitals. To reveal it in Primocanale is Dr. Emanuele Pontalidirector of infectious diseases of the Galliera of Genoa.
The ‘combined’ swabs will be necessary, according to Pontali, for the boom in incoming cases of flu. “As was expected we will slowly return to routine life, a little more indoors than this summer and without masks. The virus has started to circulate again, in fact in the last two weeks we have recorded a progressive increase in both the positivity rate and the ‘Rt, now higher than one with peaks that have also reached 1.3.
After two years of covid in which the flu has not circulated, explains the director, the fear is that this winter many fragile people will be vaccinated for covid, so they will have no problems, but easily exposed to more serious forms of flu. “People can have symptoms of one or more diseases: fatigue, fever, coughing and muscle pain, unfortunately they are very similar.”
“Now swabs are coming out on the market that are able to distinguish if the patient has one of the two – he concludes -, neither or both infections. Instead of two lines, the control one and the positive one, there will be three. now, however, they will be for hospital use only “.