«More than looking for culprits today we need to invest in public health»- breaking latest news

In the face of a tragedy with so many dead we should learn to remain silent, as President Mattarella did at the funeral home for the victims of the Cutro shipwrecks, an eloquent gesture.

Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, right to retrace Covid management with a judicial inquiry?

I won’t go into the merits of the news emerging from the investigation. In February 2020 we were totally unprepared as a country, but let’s ask ourselves why. Rather than assigning the responsibility to this or that in the management of dramatic moments that anyone would have had problems dealing with lucidity, let’s not forget that in the last thirty years every attempt has been made to dismantle the National Health Service. The so-called “Lombard model” was based on the logic of the market, free choice and competition: the complete opposite of what is needed in healthcare, where the market just doesn’t work. They noticed it in England (“our health system is sick but it can still be treated” he writes Lancet) and even in the United States. That logic has also contaminated public hospitals: if you pay you are assisted immediately, otherwise you wait for months or even years. The Washington Post Yesterday’s headline went like this: public health must be put back at the center of the political agenda.

What were the main critical issues at the beginning of the pandemic?

We found ourselves with a highly contagious virus, patients arriving at the hospital one after the other, without a local medicine capable of acting as a filter. At the beginning of 2020, many experts were convinced that Covid would not reach us too. Predictions and mathematical models often fail in the face of a virus that is constantly changing and the many variables that contribute to its spread.

Why was the 2006 pandemic plan not implemented?

As explained by Donato Greco al Courier, was referring to the flu and does not apply to Covid. For example, it does not provide for distancing, nor for the establishment of “red zones”. A new pandemic plan is needed, but writing it down is not enough: training and knowledge are needed, things that are not done overnight. Today the Accademia dei Lincei published a document entitled “Preparedness to pandemics”, developed by a working group coordinated by the epidemiologist Paolo Vineis. a plan that takes years to implement.

What should politicians do?

Listening to scientists, very important, but then deciding taking into account many other aspects that do not necessarily have to do with science. It was essential to set up a technical-scientific committee made up of competent people, who gave each time the most appropriate indications for the moment we were living. Translating them into concrete interventions was the task of politics.

If a new pandemic were to arrive, would we be ready to react?

Unsaid, we may even be in a worse situation. We have fewer doctors, fewer nurses, who are increasingly tired and less motivated. Even if we must not forget the wonderful things done in the last three years, which should be valued: entire departments converted in a few days, personnel trained to provide respiratory assistance; how nice if in the effort to understand what happened we also dealt with these aspects.

What is needed now?

It would be enough to implement the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr), which in mission 6 says in detail everything that should be done: “proximity networks, structures and telemedicine for territorial health care”, with Community houses in which multidisciplinary teams and integrated home assistance operate (“home as the first place of care”). Even more important to prevent the drama from repeating itself: we cannot afford any more deaths after all that has happened. And then we need to put our hand to public health: it must really be for everyone, from Turin to Trapani, and work. He even wrote it New England Journal of Medicine“If not now, when?”.