Four years after the pandemic Covidthe next Christmas it seems to be the last test for a virus now 'squeezed' between the flu and other respiratory 'cousins'. The latest weekly bulletin from the Ministry of Health recorded 60 thousand Covid cases (60,440), with a +7.2% variation compared to the previous week (56,404), and 425 deaths, +34.5% compared to 7 days ago. While vaccinations are slowly rising, 1.7 million immunizations, 232 thousand in the last week. Thus Christmas dinner and lunch continue to be seen by some experts as fertile ground for new infections. Meanwhile, open days for Covid vaccinations start tomorrow in Lazio, an attempt to relaunch the campaign. For the elderly and frail people waiting for the holidays, the use of a mask is once again wisely recommended. “The data confirm a substantial stabilization of the epidemic curve. They also indicate that especially in the Regions that have promoted the vaccination campaign and the protection of the vulnerable the most, the trend is decreasing”. Thus the general director of Health Prevention of the Ministry of Health, Francesco Vaia, in the commentary on the weekly bulletin on Covid-19. The question deaths Covid worries the infectious disease specialist instead Massimo Andreoni. “The data on deaths added to the other weeks of December already brings the total this month to over 1,000 – observes the scientific director of the Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases (Simit) – A constant increase since October that cannot leave anyone indifferent and it must call us to pay greater attention to Christmas. The elderly, the frail and the immunosuppressed must get the updated anti-Covid vaccine”. But there are also those who try to give a different vision of the present. According to the immunologist Mauro Minelliresponsible for the South of the Italian Foundation for Personalized Medicine, “if the ghost of Christmas past, with the recent memory of what was, could lead us to imagine masks, curtains and safety distances again, and the ghost of Christmas future cannot and must not find us entangled in procedures with a strenuously evocative flavour, c'It is the reality of the present Christmas that cannot be lived with the perennial fear of yet another ghost who, as with Dickens' 'Scrooge', makes our nights sleeplessi”. Antonello Maruotti, professor of Statistics at Lumsa University and co-founder of StatGroup19, an inter-academic group of statistical studies on the Covid 19 pandemic, is responsible for making the weekly Covid data speak: “In some regions of the North the incidence of Covid cases is decreasing for a couple of weeks already, so the peak of the wave that started in mid-November has been reached and the NHS has held up well. Now the unknown of the Christmas holidays remains. For Covid hospitalizations we are very close to the peak, there was no great 'boom' that could have put the NHS in crisis, but we could also have expected it because 13 months ago hospitalizations were much, much higher; for example, in Lazio the intensive care units were double those occupied today. But watch out – he concludes – for the holidays because we start from the highest Covid data in 2023, we could have a Christmas without pressure on hospitals if we are careful and avoid risky situations”.
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