Never before in Italy has it been necessary to do sequencing, that is to obtain the genetic map of the virus in circulation: the physicist Roberto Battiston, of the University of Trento and coordinator of the Observatory of epidemiological data in collaboration with the National Agency for Regional Health Services (Agenas).
"Making the calculations today is difficult because the variables involved are too many: but the main problem is that we do not have a genomic sequencing on the swabs to understand how many are infected with Omicron and how many with Delta", Battiston told ANSA. "From Christmas onwards, the Delta was numerically dominated by Omicron, which could exceed, in some areas, 90% of the virus in circulation. The percentage that remains - continues the physicist - is still occupied by the Delta, which we know can cause hospitalizations. in intensive care and deaths. The latter, for example, are increasing relentlessly: from the end of October to today they have grown by a factor of 6 evidently linked to the Delta ".
Omicron, on the other hand, has "a very rapid growth, as it escapes the vaccine very well with two doses and partially even with three but - he observes - causes a very limited number of serious cases. Delta instead feeds the fluaso which leads to intensive care and deaths" . We are thus faced with the choice of "loosening the constraints, considering that the majority of cases are due to Omicron, but in this way we risk that the Delta will also expand with dangerous effects for the unvaccinated component of the population, or we condemn ourselves to a de facto lockdown, isolating all infected and their contacts ".
The problem, therefore, is to be able to distinguish, as much as possible, the two variants in circulation. "In the two months before Christmas, Delta's increase was exponential, albeit slow, but we no longer know if this is still the case. After Omicron's arrival, the number of infected has not remained the same: cases have grown enormously. and the Delta has most likely kept its space. " The hypothesis is then that we could have two variants in simultaneous growth, each with its doubling times "for this reason it is important to understand promptly what is happening and to do this we must sequence. If all cases of infection - says Battiston - were caused by the Omicron variant would be different, we could probably loosen the spacing,but since this is not the case we must monitor and defend ourselves against both variants ".
