“The simple reality, which many do not want to admit in order not to have to go back on past choices and positions, is that” against Covid-19 “the closures worked – as far as they worked and leaving behind enormous socio-economic and psychological damage – only as a result of a fortuitous eventi.e. the fact that the R0″, the so-called basic reproduction index (i.e. the average number of secondary infections produced by each infected person, in a population that has never come into contact with a new emerging pathogen), “of the original Wuhan virus was all in all quite low and was affected by certain containment measures”. The virologist Guido Silvestri of the School of Medicine of Emory University in Atlanta, head of the international board of the Spallanzani Institute in Rome, thus analyzes the effect of the lockdowns adopted to stem the Sars-CoV-2 ‘tsunami’ in the early stages of the pandemic.
“This – explains the scientist on Facebook, in a post with which he returns to comment on the Zero Covid policy chosen by China and the new phase announced by the Asian giant – we say that, compared to Omicron, which has a much higher R0 , there have been no ‘closures’ that held and were also compatible with the human and moral values of the Western world. See in this sense the exemplary case of New Zealand, where the dead were 7 per million inhabitants before Omicron and 425 per million after Omicron, and this despite the vaccines and the reduced pathogenicity of the new variant. While China’s draconian measures have come to shake the throne of Xi Jinping precisely in the post-congress phase in which it should have become very firm”.
“I have said it and I have written it a thousand times – Silvestri insists – and I will continue to repeat it as long as I have the strength: at the beginning of the pandemic and in full health chaos, there was a short lockdown (I myself recommended it for Georgia in April 2020). But the idea that Covid could and should be faced by eliminating sociality between people indefinitely will go down in history as one of the stupidest and most harmful ideas ever born from the human mind“, comments the virologist who adds a” Ps: curious how the images of the World Cup in Qatar made the Chinese say ‘enough’, where for weeks huge crowds of people from all over the world have gathered, embraced, screamed and sang without the shadow of a mask, and without any particular pressure on local hospitals”.
Silvestri’s reflection is inspired by “a new article onabsurdity of the Zero Covid strategy still insisted on in Chinaeven if things could soon change”. To sign the text, published in the ‘New York Times’, is global health expert Yanzhong Huang. “Interesting to note how an op-ed”, an editorial “of this type, which until a year ago would have been dismissed by the usual suspects as ‘criminal’ and ‘denier’ – observes the scientist – is now published in the NYT and now represents the voice of mainstream and politically correct epidemiology”.
“As Yanzhong Huang says, who knows about viruses and China – summarizes the Italian pro-rector in the USA – a wave of Covid, with the current low percentages of vaccinations in the elderly, would bring to that country ‘an estimated number of 363 million of infections, about 620,000 deaths, 32,000 hospitalizations per day in intensive care and a potential social and political crisis”. And it would be only the first of many waves. In other words, if this were the case – highlights Silvestri – 3 years of immense sacrifices would have been needed little or nothing”.
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