After three years of the pandemic, everything is restarting from China, where the virus risks doing serious damage. But it is said that a variant will develop capable of putting everything back into play
I am three years have passed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and perhaps we are witnessing the closing of a circle. Where it began, the pandemic seems to want to end, or so it is hoped. But the images coming from China, so similar to those of Wuhan at the beginning of 2020, cannot fail to cause some concern, even if, in the meantime, we have come a long way.
From the hospitalization of two Chinese tourists in an intensive care unit in Rome at the end of January, to the identification of the first autochthonous case in Codogno and the coffins of Bergamo, at the height of the first devastating epidemic wave that hit some areas of the north. Then the apparent calm of summer 2020, which followed the lungo lockdownand finally, on December 27, 2020, the first administration of an mRNA vaccine.
With the beginning of the vaccination campaign, almost as if it were a spell, the first of the most contagious variants arrived, the so-called Alpha, followed by the first partially immuno-evasive variants, beta and gamma; then, with the arrival of summer, Delta arrived, and since it was immediately clear that two doses of vaccine were not enough, the campaign for the third dose was launched.
In autumn/winter last year, the turning point came with the appearance of Omicron. The virus develops an unstoppable diffusion potential, but also shows a lower clinical impact, in short, it bites the throat but touches the lungs, as the clinicians of the past would have said. Moreover, the vaccine appears to protect against severe disease but only partially against symptomatic infection. In short, we are facing a paradigm shift: vaccinate to protect the elderly and the most fragile and no longer to stop the spread of the virus. this is the passage that marks the social end of the epidemic and the path towards its biological end.
at this point the news from China arrives to complicate the picture. It is there that the virus, which probably emerged in the Huanan fish market, located in the beating heart of Wuhan, a modern city of 11 million inhabitants, starts running again. In fact, while in the rest of the world the waves caused by the different variants and their sub-lineages followed one another, which was faced throughout the Alps with epidemic mitigation measures (short closures, mass vaccination, use of the green pass), China continued to face the epidemic with the so-called Zero COVID strategy, i.e. an efficient containment work based on mass testing, isolation and quarantine. It meant that while our population gradually became immunized, albeit partially, thanks to the use of vaccines and natural infection, in China, on the other hand, a large susceptible population remained present, never exposed to the virus and poorly protected by vaccination. Now that the contagiousness of Omicron – no longer containable even with extreme measures – and social protests have led the Government to suddenly relax the quarantine measures, the pandemic virus is likely to cause great harm.
Could there be repercussions for countries like ours, with a high level of immunization coverage and now heading towards endemisation? Since a virus that circulates very quickly in a large population certainly tends to mutate, this cannot be excluded, but not at all certain that a viral strain capable of putting everything back into play is selected. So the best thing you can do today is to remain cautious, avoiding unnecessary alarmism, but carefully monitoring the evolution of the virus and the trend of the epidemiological situation.
*Epidemiologist. Health Prevention DG, Ministry of Health
January 2, 2023 (change January 2, 2023 | 2:01 pm)
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