2023-12-13 15:58:00
Over 300 Covid deaths in Italy in the last week. Almost 900 in a month. Why did the numbers get so high again? “I personally have seen very few deaths truly linked to Covid – Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic of the San Martino polyclinic in Genoa, replies to time.news Salute – and these are patients who had not received any doses of the vaccine, they also had other important pathologies and above all a significant age. I’m talking about people aged 70-80 who perhaps had decided not to get vaccinated, arrived at the hospital and had complications. This is the identikit of the real Covid patient today in hospital: average age 85 years and last dose of vaccine in autumn 2021. No booster shots in 2022 and 2023”.
“Let’s look at the hospitalization data – continues Bassetti – around 80% of those who are hospitalized today with Covid are hospitalized for other reasons and then from the hospital swab they discover they are positive. They therefore do not have pneumonia or other serious symptoms of the infection. I therefore believe that 80% of the deaths we see today are not linked to pneumonia and the virus: they are people who also have Covid, but die for other reasons. That 20-25% who still die of Covid , basically consists of people who are over 70-80 years old and frail, who have not had any vaccine doses or as if they had not had any, if they underwent vaccination in 2021 without taking the boosters. In the wards and intensive care – he underlines – there are only those hospitalized for Covid who are not vaccinated”.
And in fact, according to the latest data from the Gimbe Foundation, the anti-Covid vaccination campaign is “at a standstill”, especially for the elderly and frail: among the over 80s, the age group most susceptible to hospitalizations and deaths, only those over 80 have been immunised. 7.4%, with intervals ranging from 0% in Abruzzo to 17% in Tuscany. Despite the recommendations, coverage rates in the ‘over 60s’, and in particular in the over 80s, therefore remain very low at a national level and close to zero in almost all Southern regions. According to data from the Higher Institute of Health, the deaths are almost exclusively borne by the over 80s. Compared to a mortality rate of 3 deaths per million inhabitants, in fact, there are 23 per million inhabitants in the 80-89 age group and 46 per million inhabitants in the over 90s.
Clementi
Three hundred deaths in a week, 6,600 ordinary beds occupied by Covid-positive patients, 219 in intensive care. These are the numbers of the virus today, rumors that are on the rise as Italy enters the winter season. “But a slightly different narrative is needed”, explains virologist Massimo Clementi to time.news Salute. “I see that some experts have thrown themselves back into interventions with somewhat heated tones and in my opinion there is no reason for particular concern, except that we are in winter and respiratory infections are circulating, and that this Sars-coronavirus infection is still CoV-2 is not really harnessed, it has not become one of those seasonal infections that repeat itself, but it still has a minimum of aggressiveness especially for the high age groups, over 70s and for the fragile such as people who have chronic diseases”.
“In short – continues Clementi – this virus still has a minimum level of risk for the risk categories. And all those hospitalized patients and those deaths mentioned, such as the few hospitalized in intensive care, are part of this group Therefore, it made sense to say ‘get vaccinated’ especially to these populations. But the intervention to inform about vaccination had to be much more focused. Instead, generic propaganda was made and only now are we starting to say with more incisiveness: look, we must vaccinate the elderly. It should have been done and said before.” All this, he adds, “is not very different from what is done every year for the flu. Even with flu viruses there is an increase in mortality, the chronic pathology can be decompensated precisely by the flu which is added to an abnormal clinical situation”.
Here, Clementi highlights, “now with Covid we are in a condition that is closer to what respiratory infections are like every year. There is not yet an alarm situation at this moment, but there is simply a situation in which we must remember that we are in winter and that respiratory infections for people who have other pathologies can be important”. Is the death figure a number that is somehow closer to the flu data? “Yes, but now my fear is that we will return to counting the dead, as we did in the past. There is no reason to do so”, warns the expert. “Omicron – he specifies – is no longer an aggressive virus for pneumonia. Cases of pneumonia are very few, they are truly the exception. Omicron infects the upper airways, even in its most recent versions, so much so that it has had a big role in ‘immunising’ the population. The invitation to frail people and those over 70 is therefore to give the reminder” updated to the most recent Sars-CoV-2 variants, “to have this attention. It is a vaccination which protects against the disease and the consequences it can have. And it must be done if there have not been any major problems certified in previous vaccinations.”
Pregliasco
In Italy “Covid-19 is in a growth phase, underestimated” in terms of size. “Even at hospital level there is an increase” in hospitalizations, “about 70% ‘with Covid’, but 30% ‘due to Covid'”. And deaths are rising: “More than 300 per week, with a presumable upward trend”, warns the virologist of the State University of Milan Fabrizio Pregliasco. Who are the victims? “These are mainly elderly people – explains the expert to time.news Salute – elderly people with comorbidities and, sadly, elderly people who are not vaccinated or who, in most cases, have only had the first three doses of the vaccine and then have deemed it necessary to do no more”.
For Pregliasco, what weighs heavily, causing damage by sinking the vaccination campaign against Covid-19, are the “negativities that emerge” and are proposed as “the truth that no one tells”: we talk, “wrongly and not reflecting reality”, of “a vaccine that hurts” or “a pathology that has become like the flu. But we have always said that the flu also causes its problems and Covid at the moment causes proportionally more”.
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