The growth of the Covid epidemic is moving forward exponential and its doubling time – of about seven days – suggests about 400 thousand cases a day for next week: so many that it will be impossible to locate them all. Consequently, the only reliable photograph of the painting will have to be based on hospitalizations. To tell theAnsa is the physical Giorgio Sestili, science communicator and animator of the Facebook page “Coronavirus – Scientific data and analysis”. “Last week the growth was 151%, with a doubling time of four to five days. Currently the weekly increase is 114% and consequently next week the cases could be about 400 thousand a day, but we would not be able to register them because our ability to swab will not go that far ”, he explains. To get to register such a number of infections, in fact, it would take about two million tests, while so far it has never gone beyond 1.2 million in 24 hours.
In light of this situation, no one is currently capable of calculate when the peak will come. “If it arrives in the next week, it will probably be because the infections and people in isolation will be so numerous that the curve will start to go down, as it did in South Africa,” says the scholar. Emphasizing however that at this moment precise projections are not possible: “We are interested in understanding the order of magnitude of the problem. Assuming that the infections are more than 150,000 per day (probably an underestimate), which in the next 20 days can become altogether three millions and that each infected person could quarantine three or four, between now and the end of January the people in isolation in Italy could be between 7 and 12 million, never so many in such a short period of time “.
As for hospitalizations, however, those in ordinary wards are increasing exponentially every 21 days: this means that if today they are about 15 thousand, in three weeks they will be about double, with peaks comparable to those of previous waves of the pandemic (April 6 2021 reached a peak of 33,000 hospitalizations on 6/4 2021, November 24, 2020 of 39,0000 and March 4, 2020 of 33,000). The curve of admissions in intensive care, adds Sestili, continues to follow a linear trend. “To limit the number of hospitalizations – he observes – is the effect of vaccines: according to British data their effectiveness against Omicron is 88% after the third dose and over 95% against Delta”.
According to the physicist, the introduction of thegeneralized vaccination obligation for the over 50s (criticized by most scientists) it will not help slow the curve of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy, while – if observed – it could have positive effects on hospitalizations. “The obligation will not be able to bring down the contagion curve in one or two weeks and no closures have been arranged that can bring it down with containment measures,” he noted. Assuming that all 2.3 million over 50s get vaccinated, however, and considering that “in the age group between 40 and 59, an unvaccinated ends up in hospital 15 times more compared to a vaccinated e 32 times more in intensive care ”, it follows that hospitalizations in ordinary wards would be reduced by 15 times and hospitalizations by 32 and 32 in intensive care. “I am gigantic numbers: if we vaccinated all the over 50s – he concludes – in 45 days it could be the end of the hospital emergency “