“With a high contagion situation, thinking about reopening means that in a month we will have an increase in Covid-19 cases and the summer will be at risk and we should close”. So at time.news Salute Andrea Crisanti, director of Microbiology and Virology of the University of Padua, comments on the reopening announced yesterday by the Minister of Health Roberto Speranza and by Prime Minister Mario Draghi. “To re-propose the yellow, orange and red areas is to continue with a hellish system – he warns – and it is the demonstration that in a year an effective alternative has not been found and adequate tools have not been built to contain the epidemic. always there, with oscillations between yellow and orange areas, in the former it opens up and the contagion increases “.
Yesterday the Prime Minister spoke of “reasoned risk” for the reopening roadmap: “I hope they have projections – observes Crisanti – But we don’t see the numbers, there is no transparency. The expression ‘reasoned risk’ is empty and decidedly political and unscientific. The risk is given by two components, the probability and the intensity of the risk. For the first we already know that the infections will increase and it is not a probability, with the reopening this will happen. We would need a program of drum-beating vaccinations to avoid it. The intensity – recalls the expert – is the severity of the phenomenon and our data are still high, with openings will increase and we should close in the summer, when the other countries will be out of the tunnel “.
What is happening in Italy is “the result of a mediation between those who are cautious and those who want to open everything – warns Crisanti – We are a country hostage to a pressure group that makes partisan interests prevail over public health”.
But what will the scenario be in the coming weeks then? “I don’t have a crystal ball, but infections will increase”, replies the virologist who then also reflects on the number of deaths “still very high in Italy and it is not clear why, perhaps – he speculates – this figure is distorted by that of the new ones positive that are certainly more than those recorded, because the tracking system has not worked for months “.