(Adnkronos) - “Il futuro del Covid19 quale sarà? Un serie di micro ondate epidemiche. Non avremo più grandi ondate ma delle mini onde in cui avremo localmente, e con scarsa capacità di previsione, una diffusione del virus che andrà a colpire in maniera abbastanza robusta soprattutto i pazienti fragili e immunodepressi. Su questi ultimi l’attenzione dei medici e della comunità scientifica si dovrà andare a focalizzare”. Lo ha dichiarato il Prof. Marco Falcone, dell’Università di Pisa e segretario SIMIT, a margine dell’evento “Dalla pandemia al New Normal, tra Covid e Long Covid, organizzato da HC Training a Roma presso il Palazzo dell’Informazione di Adnkronos
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00:00 We started with the pandemic, with COVID-19, as an endemic disease spread all over the world that caused millions of deaths.
00:11 Thanks to the vaccine immunity, thanks to the fact that the population has now developed a basic immunity,
00:17 COVID-19 is no longer the disease of a year or two ago, it is a disease that causes generally moderate and generally mild infections,
00:27 but which can have a big and important impact on some categories of patients.
00:33 The most fragile patients, that is, the elderly, immunodepressed patients, patients who are subjected to immunosuppressive therapies for various pathologies.
00:41 Today we have a very wide category of immunodepressed patients.
00:44 In this category of COVID-19 patients, the SARS-CoV-2 infection is still a very important and very serious infection.
00:51 On the one hand, it can cause hospitalization and pneumonia, on the other hand, it slows down access to treatment.
00:57 That is, the positive patient must be sent back to chemotherapy, to the spinal tract transplant, to the organ transplant.
01:04 This is something we cannot afford. Here is the surveillance on the virus.
01:08 The Omicron virus has marked the definitive change of the infection,
01:12 linked to a lower pathogenicity and the spread of very, very diffuse variants, but also very immune-evasive.
01:23 That is, they tend not to be intercepted by the antibodies that we have produced with the vaccine or with the previous infections.
01:31 So what will the future be? A series of epidemic microwaves.
01:35 We will no longer have large waves, but microwaves, mini-waves, as the Americans call them,
01:42 in which we will locally and with a poor forecasting capacity,
01:47 of the spread of the virus, which will hit, however, in a fairly robust way,
01:51 especially fragile and immunodepressed patients.
01:54 And on those, the attention of doctors and the scientific community today will have to focus.
02:00 We should be able, first of all, to follow the virus, sequence it and understand the modifications,
02:07 because it is an extremely plastic virus, it really changes from one week to another.
02:12 We now have Omicron underlining, which are called with various exotic names, Kraken, Centaurus, etc.,
02:18 which have a transmissibility that is 7-8 times higher than that of the original V1 virus.
02:26 So the virus evolves. Our ability is to follow the evolution of the virus
02:31 and understand how it impacts the most at-risk populations.
02:34 In some populations, the surveillance must be maximum,
02:37 and therefore the prevention with vaccines or the early treatment with the new antiviral drugs,
02:43 which are extremely interesting, will have to be a mission to minimize the impact of an infection
02:49 that we hope will become an infection with which to live, and not an infection that still has bad surprises.
02:55 The only problem is that those who make predictions are wrong, in this case because it is very difficult to predict,
03:01 and therefore we must be extremely careful in monitoring the phenomenon.