The arrival in Italy of the Covid XBB.1.16 or ‘Arturo’ variant certified yesterday by the survey of the Higher Institute of Health, “is an expected event, sooner or later it had to happen that it arrived in Italy. It is under attention because it is spreading a lot in India, like so many others before. If it’s really more contagious, it could take the place of ‘Kraken’ which has gone almost unnoticed anyway. I think it will be the same for ‘Arturo’, but if it weren’t like that though and there was a increase in cases in children with related cases of conjunctivitis” among the symptoms, “will be a clear signal and warning of the need to increase vaccination coverage in young people”. So at time.news Salute Mauro Pistellodirector of the virology unit of the University Hospital of Pisa, vice president of the Italian Society of Microbiology and one of the founders of the sequencing network of the Higher Institute of Health (ISS).
Per Massimo Ciccozzihead of the Medical Statistics and Epidemiology Unit of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Campus Bio-Medico in Rome, “the fact that the ISS genomic surveillance has found the Covid XBB.1.16 or ‘Arturo’ variant in Italy does not must surprise, it almost certainly arrived from India where there is an increase in Covid cases due precisely to XBB.1.16. There must be no alarm, we must know by now after three years of the Covid emergency that viruses travel with people and do not are borders. On Monday we will have 10 XBB.1.16 sequences available in our laboratory and we will begin to do more in-depth analyses, from previous works it is possible to say that the mutations of the ‘spike’ protein make us think that ‘Arturo’ derives from ‘Kraken’ which , as we have seen, gives mild symptoms of Covid disease”.
The first cases of the ‘Arturo’ variant in Italy “remind us that the virus is still among us and will remain for a long time. Xbb.1.16 is still part of the Omicron family: it is a bit immuno-evasive and highly contagious, with clinical manifestations that take us back to the beginning of the history of the virus, such as conjunctivitis. This is part of the small antigenic variations of Sars-Cov-2, which we know does not only affect the respiratory tract. In this case, we have no particular cause for concern ” is the picture drawn by Fabrizio Pregliascovirologist at the State University of Milan.
“Covid has now an undulating trend – he explains – with a tendency to decrease in our country. The pandemic does not go in synch all over the world: India is facing a new wave, the situation is under control here, with a low commitment of ordinary wards and intensive care. But we still have over 100 deaths a day, especially elderly people with various dependent diseases and who have been vaccinated for some time. I believe that an anti-Covid vaccination should be organized every 6 months”.