The prediction of the World Health Organization (WHO) regarding the pandemic could not be more worrying. The entity’s deputy director, Ranieri Guerra, warned in an interview with RAI that the new coronavirus could behave like the Spanish flu, which just over a century ago “lost strength in the summer and returned fiercely in September and October, causing 50 million deaths during the second wave”.
With these statements, Ranieri Guerra responded to a recent document produced by Italian experts, who ended the period of emergency.
These experts, who are fighting on the front lines to contain the pandemic, are convinced that the virus has lost strength. “Long-standing and ambiguous clinical evidence points to a marked reduction in symptomatic cases of covid-19,” say ten experts.
However, WHO warns that this is not the case. “With the disappearance of the virus in the clinic, it seems that everything is over, but it is not so. I do not delve into the artificial classifications produced by colleagues from various disciplines. I look at the facts and they say that the virus genome remains the same and the facts say that the trend of an epidemic like this is largely predictable. There is a decline that coincides with the summer, ” argued Ranieri Guerra.
“It is true that the intensive care units were empty. They did what we expected to happen, but we don’t want them to be filled again in the fall. All the precautions we are taking are aimed at limiting the circulation of the virus when the new wave begins” , stressed the expert.
Guerra says the best weapon to deal with the coronavirus in the fall is expected to be the flu vaccine. “Italy is prepared to vaccinate 100% of the population against influenza, according to the instructions given by the Italian Ministry of Health,” said the WHO deputy director, of Italian nationality.
In the same vein, Walter Ricciardi, a consultant to the Italian health minister, Soberto Speranza, says that the “virus will spread among young people, who will become carriers of the infection”. “The problem will be that, due to the lack of safety measures on the part of young people, they will transmit the virus to their grandparents and parents and we will see pressure on the health system. This will happen in the fall,” he concluded.
While Europe is suspicious and adapting to a new “normal”, despite the fears of a second wave of the epidemic, the new coronavirus continues its exponential progression in Latin America and the Caribbean, where more than 100 thousand deaths have been registered, more half of which in Brazil.
Since last month, the number of cases has tripled in this subcontinent, populated by 630 million people, which now records 2.2 million cases, almost the same in Europe, including Russia. And it is currently responsible for a quarter of cases of contamination and a fifth of deaths related to covid-19 worldwide. The number of infected people has doubled in less than a month. Peru (264 thousand cases) and Chile (250 thousand) have more cases than Italy (239 thousand), with populations two and three times smaller, respectively.
Spanish flu killed between 50 to 100 million in 1918 and 1919
The Spanish flu originated from migratory birds, which passed the virus to a pig farm in Kansas, United States, which in turn infected a soldier who infected others during the First World War.
The 1918 flu virus proved 25 times more deadly than other identical viruses, mainly due to overcrowded military camps, poor food and poor sanitary conditions during the war. Many deaths have resulted from bacterial pneumonia in individuals already weakened by the flu. At the peak of the epidemic, more than 1,500 military personnel came to report the disease in a single day.
50 to 100 million people will have died between 1918 and 1919 with the disease, historians estimate – more victims than those caused by the two Great Wars combined and by HIV / AIDS for 40 years.
In total, something like 5% of the world population at the time was lost and around 500 million individuals were infected. The spread was so rapid that it killed 25 million people in the first six months.
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