The meeting of the technical-scientific committee requested by the government is in progress to evaluate the possibility of any new restrictive measures in light of the increase in infections
.
Among the hypotheses on the table of experts, the introduction of the criterion of 250 cases per 100 thousand inhabitants to automatically enter the red zone - already proposed by the technicians in January but rejected by the Regions - a further tightening on weekends, with generalized closures, and of the stiffer red areas, as was done in Codogno and in the other municipalities in the first wave of the virus.
"On the vaccine-resistant variants, we have to get into our heads that we need zero tolerance. Where they occur and there is an outbreak, everything must be closed, Codogno style, because we cannot allow them to spread throughout the country. It would mean resetting the country's clock. a year back ", said
Andrea Crisanti,
full professor of microbiology at the University of Padua, speaking during the Agorà broadcast on Rai 3. With respect to the variants, the expert also distinguishes between the classic variant that hit Europe in the first months and the English one.
"With the first, children had a resistance from 20 to 30 times greater than an adult and this allowed the nursery schools to be left open.
The English variant, on the other hand, broke this barrier and spreads well even in children up to 5 years old
. And "The epidemiological picture has changed, ignoring it entails the risk of increasing infections. It is right that the new characteristics of the virus be taken into consideration. The agenda is dictated by the virus, if the virus changes, the measures must change".
As for the parameters used to make decisions, according to Crisanti, "RT is a parameter that is available when the data is already old, the number of weekly cases is a less precise but more timely parameter, and could be accompanied by the percentage of positives to molecular swabs ".
"You do not vaccinate when there is high transmission of the virus because doing so favors the emergence of variants resistant to the vaccine.
This is why I believe that the measure on the table of the CTS goes in the right direction, try to shut down the transmission and try to vaccinate as many people as possible,
"explained Crisanti.
Compared to the possible solutions according to Crisanti
", a generalized lockdown followed by another lockdown and another lockdown is unthinkable
.
We need a clear and precise plan that is the last one
. To do this, a national funded plan for monitoring the variants and strengthening the system of surveillance because even if we will be vaccinated in a few months, this will not be the case in the rest of the world and - concluded Crisanti - we must ensure that Italians can move abroad ".
