The experts of the Scientific Technical Committee and the control room of the majority will meet during the week. The so-called “Delta variant” of Covid is rampant throughout Europe, and it is necessary to decide how to deal with it.
The contagion curve has started to grow again, but in Italy as elsewhere in ways that for the moment do not cause particular concern.
The number of hospitalized, deaths and intensive care units say that vaccines work, and that only the so-called herd immunity will allow us to definitively get out of the emergency. According to the estimates in the possession of CTS experts, in four or five weeks Italy will have a number of daily infections comparable to the thirty-one thousand yesterday in Great Britain.
But with a decisive one: in the face of so many infected, the number of deaths there remains extremely low: twenty-six. The government and the CTS hope that the proportion will remain the same in Italy, taking into account the fact that in Great Britain the vaccination campaign is further ahead: more than half of the British are protected with two doses against about a third of Italians.
In Great Britain the first dose was inoculated to two thirds of people, in Italy we are just over half.
It is no coincidence that in Italy the most affected by the Delta variant are young, unvaccinated or those who have received only one dose. The positivity rate is 0.97 percent, up from 0.67 a week ago. The test positives identified in the last 24 hours are 1,391 – just a few less than Friday – the victims are 12 and the people still in intensive care 161.
The CTS coordinator Franco Locatelli explains: “The increase in infections is largely due to the progressive dominance of the Delta variant, 60 percent more contagious than the Alfa”.
Trentino and Valle d’Aosta are the only regions where the weekly incidence is decreasing. In Molise the cases have more than tripled, in Veneto and Sardinia more than doubled.
In any case – says Locatelli – «there is no need for alarmism. The data on deaths and ICU admissions are much more comforting thanks to vaccinations. This is why the immunization of over-60s must be completed quickly ».
Sergio Abrignani, member of the CTS and president of the national institute of molecular genetics in Milan, explains the matter in numbers: «Among the vaccinated about a third get infected anyway, but the disease is almost always asymptomatic. The protection against severe forms is 94 percent ».
Among those over eighty in the last two weeks, 59 percent of hospitalizations, 78 percent of ICU admissions and 70 of deaths occurred among people who did not receive any dose of the vaccine: it is about eight percent of total. 24 percent of those infected are under the age of 19, 62 percent between 20 and 59, 13.5 over sixty.
It therefore remains crucial for the government to proceed relentlessly in the vaccination campaign. And this is the reason why – as confirmed by anonymous executive sources – the government will confirm a state of emergency at the end of the month for at least another three months, or at the end of October.
Without it, the commissioner structure and the powers of General Figliuolo, necessary to coordinate the delivery and distribution of the vials throughout the national territory, would cease to exist.
In the meantime, the government will have to make some decisions. The first: whether or not to eliminate the obligation to wear a mask outdoors, and whether to remove the latest restrictions, such as those that do not allow the reopening of discos.
The League is pressing for this to happen, albeit with the necessary precautions, for example by guaranteeing entry only to vaccinated or tamponed people. The Regions, on the other hand, are pressing for a review of the parameters on the basis of which the “colors” and the level of restrictions are decided.
Today the number of total cases is taken into account, but the low incidence of serious cases among those infected by the Delta is convincing everyone that this is too severe a parameter.
For this reason we will change and move to the so-called “Rt hospital”, which takes into account hospitalized people. The government control room and the CTS experts will discuss this and the rest. –
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