The curves of the Covid-19 epidemic are beginning to slow down their descent: this is true for that of admissions to intensive care units as well as for new cases and deaths, while in about half of the provinces the incidence values have stopped falling and are in a phase of stagnation. The drop in infections in the week between Monday 28 and Sunday 6 March was 11.7%. That is, we go from 289,598 weekly cases to 255,656. Last week it was -20%, the first -24%. Not only. The data of the last few days indicate a slight rise in infections: 35,057 new cases on Sunday 6 March against 30,629 on the previous Sunday; 39,963 on Saturday 5 March compared to 38,375 on the previous Saturday.
Stops the decline in intensive care admissions
As for hospitalizations, currently all Italian regions have white-band numbers (ordinary hospitalizations under 15% or in intensive care under 10%), with the exception of Sardinia (20.2% in non-critical area and 13 , 2% in resuscitation), which still records data from the yellow band. And it must be said that the color system will be eliminated from April 1st. But even if the decline in hospitalizations continues (-19% in the last week), according to the mathematician Giovanni Sebastiani of the National Research Council (Cnr), the data indicate that “nationally, in the first week of March there was a slowdown in descent of the curve of daily admissions to intensive care, the average value of which in the last seven days is equal to about 45 units “, observes the expert. “The same – he continues – has happened since the last week of February for the death curve, the average value of which in the last seven days is equal to about 200 deaths per day”.
Incidence stable or growing in half of the Italian provinces
The incidence values in the provinces are also towards stasis: the analysis of the data of the incidence of positives to both types of tests, antigenic and molecular, in the last two weeks for the 107 Italian provinces, says Sebastiani, reveals that almost half of them (49) is in a “phase of stalemate, or growth”, concludes Sebastiani.
Summer still far away
“We are witnessing a reduction in the number of cases, but we see that they are decreasing more slowly” adds physicist Enzo Marinari, of the Sapienza University of Rome. “The trend we are observing makes us expect that the descent of the curve could stop in the next few days, settling on a high plateau, around 20,000 cases per day, but thanks to vaccinations the number of serious cases and deaths would not be high “. According to the physicist, “a small slowdown is also beginning to be observed in the descent of the death curve: it will be necessary to see at what level they will stop.” Certainly, he added, “we must consider that summer is still far away and the weather factor is not yet playing a role”. On the other hand, he observes, “the two great peaks of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy of 2021 and 2020 we had them in April”
“We don’t have to look at the positive tampons or the percentage of positives, because they don’t tell us anything. We have to look at the serious cases, who goes to the hospital, why they go and how long there is. This data is constantly falling. Covid departments are nearly empty or are emptying. It’s true, there was an increase in infections at 7 days but I’m not worried, I would have been if we had gone from 600 people in intensive care to 700 “is the comment by Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic of the San Polyclinic Martino of Genoa,