Covid-19, where are we with the pandemic in Italy

Covid-19

The contagion curve has started to rise again, for what should be the sixth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet intensive care is almost empty, deaths remain in the tens and limitations on personal freedoms are reduced to the requirement of a mask on means of transport and in hospitals. So, where are we with the pandemic?

sportsgaming.win has lined up some data to try to understand what is going on. And it has created two indicators that allow us to measure the severity of the pandemic situation.

The sixth wave The numbers that Civil Protection provides daily allow us to outline the contagion curve. A curve that, as mentioned, has started to rise again. Here is the situation:

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Here if you do not see the graph The red line represents the number of Covid-19 cases calculated on weekly basis. Now, the fact that in the first and second waves the infections were minor is due to two factors. One is related to the much stricter containment measures that were in place, starting with the lockdown. The other to the fact that the number of infections depends on the number of tampons. And Italy surpassed 100,000 tampons a day for the first time on 2 September 2020. On January 18 of this year, to give an idea, it was close to 1.5 million.

The increase in infections seen in recent months is also weighed down by the fact that the new variants are more contagious and more capable of overcoming the barriers posed by vaccines. The good thing is that they are also less able to reach the pulmonary alveoli. Which means they are less likely to cause severe symptoms, which results in less pressure on intensive care wards

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Here if you don't see the graph In this case, the red line represents the number of people admitted to the ICU and Sars-CoV-2 positive on a daily basis. As can be seen, the levels seen during the first wave were never exceeded in the following ones. Confirming the fact that the recent increases in infections, far higher than those recorded in the first pandemic phase (at least for how the system was able to measure the trend by performing swabs), are having a lower impact on Italian hospitals.

The indicators It is precisely to measure the impact of the pandemic in terms of hospitalizations and deaths, sportsgaming.win has built two indicators, which relate these two elements with the infections recorded daily. Specifically, it was decided to calculate the incidence every 10 thousand cases of Sars-CoV-2 positivity. One way to understand how much the contagion curve is generating serious consequences from the point of view of the saturation of wards and deaths. The first graph is about hospitals:

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Here if you don't see the graph The red line shows the report, on a weekly basis, between admissions to intensive care and new infections. The data starts from November 2020 because before the data on intensive care admissions was not communicated. The Civil Protection provided, and still does, the total number of hospitalized, but this number is not useful for this type of calculation. This is because it does not provide information regarding new entries and exits from IT departments, due to either patient discharge or death. For this reason we have chosen to rely on the data on admissions, although it has been available for less time.

As can be seen, the relationship between the latter and the infections is decidedly lower today than in the first phase of the pandemic. When, it is true, there were fewer tampons. But non-pharmacological measures to contain the pandemic were in place and the virus was less contagious. In the week ending June 20, there were 5.4 admissions to intensive care for every 10,000 cases. At the beginning of April of last year there were close to 150 hospitalizations for every 10 thousand cases.

A similar trend is recorded when looking at deaths. A data, the latter, also available for the first phase of the pandemic:

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Here if you do not see the graph The line red represents the number of deaths every 10 thousand infections. To read this graph, it is important to remember that in the first phase of the pandemic few swabs were performed and they were done above all to symptomatic patients. Many asymptomatic positives have not been detected and this helps to raise the indicator. However, in the last week it recorded just 25 deaths for every 10 thousand new cases, one of the lowest values ​​seen so far. At the end of May 2020 there was 1 death for every 4 infections.

In essence, the numbers confirm that the virus in circulation is no longer the one that arrived in Europe at the beginning of 2020. In the sense that a in the face of a decidedly higher number of infections, severe forms and deaths are far fewer. A contraction with respect to which the vaccination campaign that began in our country at the end of 2020 with the immunization of health personnel has certainly contributed.