Covid state of emergency in Italy, extension yes or no? While the Undersecretary of Health Andrea Costa once again assures that the government is “working on the stop” in view of the deadline
scheduled for next March 31st, the experts intervene on the issue, including calls not to extend the measure or those to be cautious. To speak are Bassetti, Vaia, Andreoni and Gismondo.
“Common sense tells us that after two years the state of emergency is right for it to end and for us to return to living as we did before. I would like us to pass from the phase in which we fill our mouths about living with the virus to that which you really do, “he stresses to time.news Salute Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic of the San Martino Polyclinic in Genoa. According to the expert, the state of emergency, which expires on March 31, should not be extended, also “because a country that has a large number of elementary school children in Dad, due to contacts with a friend who had a cold, is not living with Covid. If I have to wear a mask to walk along the seafront, it means that it is not a country that does not live with the virus. Lifting the state of emergency will serve to change people’s heads. The danger today is people’s resignation, the pessimism they have. And I see this every day, few who travel or go to the cinema and the theater. Italy is psychologically depressed, it’s not all over but we have to get out of the emergency “. “So swab only the symptomatic ones, just Dad, we have to turn. Even yesterday we could do more with the obligation to wear a mask outdoors and say that this rule that we saw with Omicron ended immediately was not needed”, remarked Bassetti .
“One thing seems clear to me: we are heading towards a spring of rebirth. If the data continue to be confirmed, both the observational ones on the population and those deriving from the increasingly numerous studies on Omicron in particular, we will have to mitigate the measures, simplify everything, always regain possession of more than spaces for socializing. Civil society is ready and mature to continue to maintain the safeguard measures that are still necessary. The Government seems to me absolutely available “, the director of Inmi Spallanzani in Rome explains to time.news Salute. Francesco Vaia, commenting on the possibility that the state of emergency will end on 31 March. Vaia was among the first to open a new phase in managing the epidemic. “On the other hand, I have always affirmed – added the director – that the Italian way of rational optimism, of graduality and of the measures to be taken according to the epidemic trend, together with vaccinations, has proved to be the most effective in the European panorama. “. “I am therefore confident that once again the right decisions will be made to restore people’s will to live and a great boost to the recovery of the economy”, he concluded.
The possibility that the state of emergency ends according to deadline “today is only a wish, no one can have the glass ball and give certainty. Not even the politicians who are fretting a lot about this”, he replies to time.news Salute Massimo Andreoni, head of infectious disease at the Tor Vergata Polyclinic in Rome and scientific director of the Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases (Simit). “This pandemic has taught us that it is better to proceed with caution – remarks Andreoni – in the past we had to retract. There are social and economic needs, which are understandable, but today the closure of the state of emergency is within the scope of probability and not We must – he concludes – monitor the goodness of the drop in cases and understand, on the variant front, how things are going “.
“At the moment the virus is giving us respite, we have the circulation of a variant”, Omicron, “which fortunately is not raging and therefore it is right and correct, respecting the psyche and also the economy, to end it with the state of emergency, give us back a normal life “. The microbiologist Maria Rita Gismondo This is how he comments to time.news Salute on the possible end of the state of emergency on 31 March, without further extensions. “In the current conditions”, in this phase of the Sars-CoV-2 epidemic, “the state of emergency is absolutely unjustified”, said the expert, director of the Laboratory of clinical microbiology, virology and diagnostics of bioemergencies of the Sacco hospital in Milan. “As I have said several times – he repeats today – I never exclude surprises, but we must behave on the basis of the scenario that the virus offers us from time to time. And today the scenario is this”: such a fact, according to Gismondo, to justify the end of the state of emergency.