The situation of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy has now been stable for five weeks both for the number of cases and for admissions to intensive care units, while a progressive decline in deaths continues;
the situation at the local level is different, with eight provinces particularly affected.
This is what emerges from the analysis of the weekly trend of the epidemic prepared by physicist Giorgio Sestili, founder of the Facebook page 'Coronavirus-Scientific data and analysis' and of the science communication network 'giorgiosestili.it'.
"In the last week in Italy there have been 87,000 cases of Covid-19. There is a slight increase of 3% compared to the previous one - says Sestili to ANSA - but the cases are substantially in line with the trend of the latest five weeks. For the fifth consecutive week the cases are stable ".
The deaths, continues the physicist, "were 2,141 deaths in a week, or 7% less than a week ago. The death curve drops for the fifth consecutive week".
In the intensive care units "there were 979 admissions in the last week, 1% less than the previous one. For 4 weeks - Sestili notes - they have been below 4,000 units a week".
According to Sestili, there is also a slight increase in swabs which, between rapid and molecular, rose to 1.9 million in the last week.
Finally, that the situation is stable emerges from the Covindex, the Covindex index updated on the basis of the ratio between new positive cases and swabs performed and comparable to the Rt contagiousness index: "currently it is 1.01 and has fluctuated around 1 : it is the confirmation that since then the same number of cases have been registered every week ".
At the local level, the situation changes and there are eight provinces that have been particularly affected in the last week: considering the number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants, the autonomous province of Bolzano has registered 591, followed by the provinces of Pescara (448), Bologna (311), Brescia (298), Ancona (297), Trento (288), Perugia (277) and Rimini (272).
On the other hand, considering the increases, the largest were recorded in the provinces of Pescara, Siena, Bologna and Brescia.
"It is noted, Sestili notes - a correlation between the most affected areas and the presence of variants".
It emerges from the survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and the Higher Institute of Health at the beginning of February, but "at the moment we can only observe this correlation, we will be able to draw conclusions only when we have more data from the sequencing".
In this regard, Sestili cites the Nature Italy data reported by the virologist Roberto Burioni, of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan, according to which "Italy currently sequences 1.3 virus samples per thousand and takes an average time about 2 months to upload them to public archives like Gisaid ", in what Burioni judges" one of the worst performances in the world ", noting that the" UK sequences nearly 40 times more samples, with an average loading time of 21 days " .
