Covid, the health system is still unprepared. Word of doctor
The intervention of Salvatore Damato, associate professor of respiratory diseases
I quote a brief passage from the book "Spillover" by David Quammen, Adelphi, 2014. The author is a scientific journalist who has worked in the field together with epidemiologists, virologists and doctors on the occasion of various viral and bacterial endemics since 1994 in various parts of the world. The text refers to the SARS-CoV-1 corona virus endemic, which occurred in 2003 in Asia and other parts of the world:
“The symptoms of respiratory disease, induced by the SARS-1 virus, spreading by air, appear before the infection reaches the maximum infectivity, and not after. This allowed for the early diagnosis of many cases which were isolated. or hospitalized before large quantities of the virus were dispersed. This behavior was of enormous importance in the epidemic. The infected were generally too sick to walk around, there was a high secondary infection rate in health care workers. Influenza and other diseases behave in the opposite way: the peak of infectivity precedes the onset of symptoms by a few days. For this reason alone we were able to congratulate ourselves on the effectiveness of the countermeasures. History would otherwise have had more tragic outcomes. It is conceivable that the next great epidemic, the so-called big-one, will conform to the perverse model of influenza and will be able to move from one city to another on the wings of airplanes, like an angel of death ”.
Now, we are all in a big-one from SARS-CoV-2 . I believe that the health system, of which I was a part, was found unprepared at the beginning of the year, despite the detailed knowledge of the epidemic in China. Now she continues to be found unprepared. The flu vaccination campaign is in critical condition. The capillary swab campaign (identifying asymptomatic and symptomatic infected people) is also in critical condition.
We have an army with professionalism and health facilities. Can a general be entrusted with the means and authority to pursue this goal in the short term? This is not a problem of denied privacy and freedoms. This is a public health issue. Every single citizen must have their health protected.
You need to know:
1) The surgical mask is used to block the emission from the mouth and nose of the virus of which we may be unwitting carriers. It is not a significant protection against the material emitted or aerosolized by the sources of contagion. This additional protection is needed for those who work in health care facilities. Wearing the surgical mask for everyone means collaborating in blocking the infection, therefore for the benefit of all and at the same time. I mean that smoking, singing, dancing, eating, outdoors and / or without distance and necessarily without a mask, are useful activities to spread the infection. If we want a measure of individual protection from the source of infection, we must isolate ourselves or be permanently distanced.
2) Tests for antibodies against SARS-2 are not reliable because the immune response to the virus varies from subject to subject and appears weeks after infection and / or disease ( Infectious Diseases Society of America – Clinical Infectious Diseases, online September 12, 2020 ). These tests are only for diagnostic study in complex clinical cases and for statistical evaluations by public health institutes.
3) Swabs are tests that look directly for viral material. Although not very sensitive (Fang Y et al. Sensitivity of chest CT for COVID-19: comparison to RT-PCR. Radiology 2020; 200432. In Press.), They allow to identify, to a still significant extent, the infected people to isolate them / cure them.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/covid-il-sistema-sanitario-e-ancora-impreparato-parola-di-medico/ on Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:30:05 +0000.