Thursday July 2nd 2020
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After Sars-CoV-2 is known for half a year, the veils around the pathogen slowly lift. In the Italian town of Vò, where the first Italian died of Covid-19 in February, researchers tested almost all residents twice. This gives them important information – also about children.
On February 21, 2020 in Vò, a small town in Italy, the first Italian died of Covid-19. The approximately 3300 inhabitants of the municipality, which belongs to the province of Padua, are then placed under domestic quarantine for 14 days. At the same time, researchers from the University of Padua are commissioned by the Italian authorities to test as many residents of the community as possible on Sars-CoV-2.
In a week, 2812 people, that is 85.9 percent, can be smeared on the nose, the writes “Deutsche Ärzteblatt” to. The procedure is repeated two weeks later for 2,343 residents (71.5 percent).
40 percent of residents without symptoms
The researchers detected a total of 73 infections with the first tests. This corresponded to a share of 2.6 percent of the entire population of the place. Two weeks later, the test results showed that 29 people, i.e. 1.2 percent, were actively infected with Sars-CoV-2. In the first test, 29 infected people showed no disease symptoms, in the second test 13 people were symptom-free. Overall, this was around 40 percent of all infected people who had no signs of illness.
According to the calculations by the research team led by Enrico Lavezzo, the number of reproductions in Vò fell from 2.49 to 0.41, which was far below the limit of 1.0, which is considered to be the decisive factor for the spread of the virus. The lockdown imposed had a measurable impact on the site.
No child under 10 infected
According to further calculations, the viruses were detectable on average for 9.4 days, i.e. between 8 and 13 days in the smear of the infected. In addition, not a single child under 10 years of age had been infected with Sars-CoV-2, although 13 of the test persons lived in families with at least one infected person. Most infected people were older than 50 years, the researchers write about the Results of her investigations from Vò, which were published in the journal “Nature”.
Out of a total of 81 tested positive for Sars-CoV-2, 13 patients (16 percent) had to be treated in hospital. These were also mainly older people. As a further important point, the researchers stated that the virus concentration was as high in those suffering from Covid 19 as in those without symptoms. The fact that the viral load between asymptomatic and symptomatic virus carriers is comparable is an indication that all infected people have the potential to transmit, the researchers write in one further communication.
“On the one hand, a person with symptoms is likely to transmit large amounts of viruses, for example through coughing,” Lavezzo is quoted as saying. But it is also conceivable that the person feels so uncomfortable that he stays at home and thus the contacts and transmission remain limited. “On the other hand, someone with an asymptomatic infection is completely unaware that they carry the virus.” So it is possible that, depending on lifestyle and profession, the person meets a large number of people and possibly also infects them. All the more, the results of the study underline the effectiveness of the containment strategies that have been implemented in Vò.
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