Paolo Spada is a vascular surgeon at Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan and since the beginning of the pandemic he has opened an intelligent Facebook page entitled: “Pills of optimism”. Spada’s optimism is not the foolish optimism of someone who tries to observe the present trying to hide troubles and perhaps even going so far as to deny the existence of troubles. It is a realistic optimism, so to speak, of those who simply try to think about the present of the pandemic by letting themselves be guided more by common sense than by emotionality. Spada, for about a year, has been offering daily pills to provide its followers with extra elements to navigate the complicated numbers of the pandemic and occasionally uses the numbers also to think about what could work better in the pandemic management of the country.
He offered a small example on Easter Monday by proposing to the government to institute provincial rather than regional red areas, appealing to a power that the government has but does not exercise. The proposal arises from the analysis of data relating to infections. At the moment, Spada writes, 74 Italian provinces (equal to 41,763,647 people) are in the red zone despite having an incidence below the threshold of 250 cases per week per 100,000 inhabitants. Of these, 48 provinces (20,908,141 people) are red with incidence under 200 cases, 23 (8,433,097 persons) under 150 cases, and even 9 (2,4362.77 persons) under 100 cases. In fact, if the data relating to hospital accommodation is taken into consideration, there are 32 provinces that have restrictions even though they may not have them. Imagining to change the parameters used to decide which areas of the country to close and which areas of the country to close is not easy but imagining a more surgical work in the months that separate us from the end of the nightmare is perhaps a feasible dream and we were in the minister Roberto Speranza we would make this small but important pill of optimism our own. It can be done, right?