They appeared light years away pictures of the Wuhan hospital pulled up in just 10 days and delivered on February 2, 2020. In the homes of Italians they looked at the virus SARS-CoV-2 with detachment, indifference, almost nonchalance, on the other hand he was in a boundless part of the world, never and never (many, not very prophetically ruled) would he have touched us in any way.
As often happens, it is the classic bar voice that creeps in:“It can’t happen to us!”. Simultaneously, the news of the first infected Chinese couple hospitalized at the “Lazzaro Spallanzani” IRCCS Institute (INMI) in Rome also arrived; it was January 29th.
“Nothing transcendental – some other genie of the lamp whispered – simple seasonal malaise!“But it soon became clear that the skeptics (those who, when needed, always stationed in the usual bowling club, magically know how to magically be football coaches at A-level, professional skippers or even expert divers in Olympic periods) were wrong, and big.
Codogno arrives, six cases in Lombardy, and a handful of weeks after the perfect storm, whether it was from a laboratory or a bat, it doesn’t matter, hit all the continents that emerged, none excluded! The rest, as we know, is modern day history. And in this farcical riot, where even politics found itself displaced and clearly divided between alarmists and reductionists, there was nevertheless a man who, by mid-December 2019, had already understood everything, almost.
It is Prof. Alessandro Vespignani, graduated with a PhD from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, lecturer in Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston and director and founder of the Laboratory for the modeling of Biological and Socio-techincal System in same capital of Massachusetts.
He completed his postdoctoral research at Yale and Leiden Universities, worked at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (UNESCO) in Trieste and at the University of Paris Sud in France as a member of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). From 2004 to 2011, JH Rudy was Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University and founding director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research as well as associate director of the Pervasive Institute of Technology.
He is elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Europe, and a Fellow of the Harvard University Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. Recently his research activity has focused on computational modeling based on data of epidemic and diffusion phenomena and on the study of biological factors, social and technological networks.
One of those minds that predicted the spread of Zika, Ebola and Sars, constantly committed to trying to anticipate epochal phenomena to avert their nefarious outcomes and that Washington could not fail to request it in the White House anti-Covid task force, and so, in fact, it was.
The recent research published in the journal “Nature”, by his working group, establishes the presence in Italy of a new strange “strain” from the first days of January 2020, only to find it, the same month, in different areas of Europe and the United States, in California and a few weeks later on the East Coast.
A complex reconstruction, based on the analysis of many schemes and scenarios, with algorithms that identify the most plausible. Matteo Chinazzi, one of the authors who is part of the Vespignani team, admits to Ansa: “We have not simulated a single epidemic, but many possibilities, hundreds of thousands of possible evolutions, and from this basis we calculated the probability of the period in which in Italy the transmission of the cases may have occurred autonomously, and no longer by importation“.
Models that – among other things – have made it possible to develop the evolution of the pandemic on a global scale. We have therefore arrived at a result that shows how between 6 and 30 January not only the virus was present but also how easy it was in terms of contagion, Italy first and foremost. And then comes a further worrying confirmation: “there is a very low probability, but not nothing that the transmission could have started at the end of December 2019”.
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