“The weekly Covid bulletin is now anachronistic, misleading and useless. No more Covid bulletins. We need to turn the page“. Matteo Bassetti, director of Infectious Diseases at the San Martino Polyclinic in Genoa, writes this on 19 in Italy, released every Friday by the Ministry of Health, is useless and even “harmful”, adds the expert who launches an appeal to the ministry through Adnkronos Salute: “We need to stop making this bulletin, these reports” which are now “absurd and are bad for the system – he warns – because it is as if we don’t want to escape the logic that only Covid exists. Already a year ago it was time to move on. Now we all have to turn the page, including the Covid reports that no longer make sense to exist.”
“You cannot see a Covid bulletin – reasons Bassetti – in which there is talk of a 30% increase in deaths” in a week, “from 7 to 9 deaths: it is anachronistic, wrong, erroneous”, he insists. “Let’s go and see what happens with Covid-19 and we don’t seem to care what happens with the flu, with the pneumococcus, with the klebsiella infection, with the haemophilus, what happens with the metapneumovirus. Then we should make a report to everything, otherwise we continue in the error. It was 2020, 2021, 2022, it’s another thing to continue with these reports today. It’s absurd – repeats the infectious disease specialist – that today, with these numbers there are still headlines that talk about Covid. The weekly bulletin must be stopped, it is meaningless and only fuels conspiracy theories.”
Maria Rita Gismondo, director of the Laboratory of clinical microbiology, virology and bioemergency diagnostics at the Sacco hospital in Milan, says she “absolutely agrees” with Bassetti. “Enough weekly bulletins on Covid, I don’t know who needs them”, she says.
“We should have done it even before”, agrees Gismondo who had already observed in the past: “The bulletin never made sense. It didn’t have it when communicating with imprecise data during the pandemic, it doesn’t have it now that the pandemic is over”. Furthermore, the expert pointed out, “the bulletin is not a snapshot of what happened during the week, due to gaps due to data collection”. Today more than ever “I would say no more weekly reports”, she repeats. Bulletins which “among other things – he underlines – we have never issued in the past for other respiratory infections which in any case were of a certain severity. Enough is enough”.
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