There are 48,456 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, against 56,386 yesterday but above all 30,526
last Sunday. The processed swabs are 199,340 (yesterday 258,456) with a positivity rate that rises from 21.8% to 24.3%. The deaths are 44 (yesterday 40). The total number of victims since the beginning of the pandemic thus rises to 168,102. Hospitalizations are on the rise: 2 more intensive care units (yesterday +0), which are thus 227 in all with 18 daily admissions. And another 190 more are ordinary hospitalizations (yesterday +137) for a total of 5,532. This is what emerges from the daily bulletin of the Ministry of Health.
The microbiologist Perno: the infection gallops regardless of the summer
“Sars-CoV-2 gallops calmly and continues to infect. It is circulating regardless of the summer break, which is already predictable. The number of infections is significant, higher than what we see, and a lot also depends on the do-it-yourself tampons that then for many reasons they are not declared in case of positivity. So the virus infects and we will hardly get rid of it. Another thing is Covid, the disease, because the vast majority of infected people have very limited symptoms, which can be defined as a small flu “. Like this Carlo Federico Pernodirector of the Microbiology Unit of the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome who, in taking stock of the progress of the epidemic, made a point of specifying, with regard to the summer wave, that this virus being among those “who do not follow the climatic trend, as it belongs to the family of those viruses that cause colds and which are present all year round, it is normal that it does not disappear in summer “.
“Many infections but less severe disease and few deaths”
Perno then talks about lights and shadows in this epidemic phase. “The shadows are that the virus continues to circulate and we have infections, but, despite the new infections and the consequent increase in hospitalizations, the lights are that there is little disease, the vaccine is doing its job and above all, the most common denominator. important, that of deaths, tells us that they remain stable or even tend to decrease, with a mortality that is less than 1 per thousand, compared to the numbers of those who become infected “.
Vaccines protect against disease not infection
“The 40 deaths yesterday are people who contracted the infection but did not necessarily die from Covid”, explains Perno, who is very keen to specify the distinction between “infections and the severe phase of the disease, and mortality which is decreasing”. On infections among vaccinated people even with three doses Perno explains that vaccines “structured as they are, protect against disease not from infection and not because they are limited but because they are designed for this” and ensure that the virus “does not enter the body and in the lungs “. Finally, on reinfections, which according to the latest data from the Higher Institute of Health (Iss) rose to 8.4%, those who had Covid before December 2021 caught Covid “of a virus that was different from that current and very rarely evolves into a serious disease.
Instead, we are observing very carefully who reinfects Omicron with Omicron. At the moment these are very rare cases and even in these cases the disease is very limited if not completely absent “.