It is right, important and above all patriotic give up a good deal of our freedoms of movement, business, assembly, worship, study etc. to implement a collective effort aimed at reducing COVID-19 infection in Italy. In this sense, our country, like other times in history, has become an example for others, who have imitated the policies implemented so far by the Conte government, adjusting them here and there, for example by closing the incoming and outgoing borders, such as Italy did not need to do. Indeed, the doors have been slammed in the face by countries, such as Kuwait, Bahrain and Austria, which now overflow with cases of infected due to internal outbreaks not attributable to the Lodigiano or Bergamo area. It must also be said that at this point we arrived after the majority, the prime minister and some opposition had also tried to minimize ...
It is good to remember that we are faced with a unique combination in the history of the pandemic and the global recession. The effort we are making is sacrosanct and must be carried out seriously, but it will certainly not be enough to solve the problems.
Do we want to delude ourselves, thinking that it is enough to close bars, shopping centers and businesses for a month or even two to beat a microorganism? We live in the XNUMXst century and use XNUMXth century vehicles, thinking that they are not only necessary (and to a large extent they are) but above all sufficient.
We know that they have frightening recessive and deflationary effects: "We put - wrote the New York Times in late February - that Americans stop going to restaurants or traveling for tourism or business. In that case 68% of the GDP will go up in smoke ". However, such a sacrifice is helpful in limiting the damage, but it should not give us the impression of being safe: China itself knows the phenomenon of re-infestation due to people who have become infected in Italy, the United States, Russia etc.
In short, we must keep in mind that the result of all this is and will always be fragile. Not only countries that do not participate in this collective effort in the future will threaten the results from outside, forcing us to close the doors in the face of Japanese, Russian, Turks etc. so as not to run the risk of re-infecting us. And this will kill tourism and air travel. More simply, to give an example, the student Mario Bianchi, graduating in Philosophy of Law, will have been imprisoned at home for three weeks to write his thesis, fed only by the home deliveries of the nearby supermarket, which student today is more or less as usual: he has only a little conjunctivitis and a mild cough, probably - he thinks - caused by his usual allergy to grasses. He does not know and does not expect to be a carrier of the coronavirus, or rather to be about to become a super diffuser. Yes, because after 3 April and also the other two weeks added by the Conte government to prevent the Easter rites from functioning as an accelerator for the decreasing contagion, Mario Bianchi has finally finished working on the thesis and does a few simple things: he spends little money for an "adventure" with a "friend", he goes out with some colleagues of the course, coming to graduate like him, to eat a pizza and, finally, he goes to his older brother's house, where he spends a week with him and his three children four, seven and thirteen years old. Even before returning to his apartment, Mario Bianchi created the basis for more outbreaks: the girl moves to a tourist location and infects roommates and other "friends", her classmates spread the coronavirus in their environments, the grandchildren take him to kindergarten, elementary and middle school. And so the cycle starts again ...
The fact is that Mario is a boy in his early twenties and the "infected" are more or less his own age or much younger: in them, of good health and robust constitution, the infection is very likely to produce mild symptoms or in any case less visible. The "mature" friends of the adventure girl, the grandparents and parents of the students and the grandparents of the schoolmates of her grandchildren will be more devastated and will also have a 10% chance of dying. Over half will be hospitalized if infected. But imagine that they are isolated for four to eight months from the rest of the world, even from their family members, living in their home, served by volunteers, and using only modern technologies to communicate with the little ones. The impact on the health system would be more contained. Much. Let's also imagine that Mario or one of his friends are finally subjected to the swab and that in Italy, as in Israel and South Korea, there is a system for tracking contacts with positive cases, using cellular terminals. Here, magically, the risk of an outbreak is decreasing: schoolmates, relatives, acquaintances and even simple passers-by who have come into contact with the infected can be identified and subjected to a serious quarantine. To do all this, a decree by the prime minister would be enough to secure the most fragile (elderly, chronically ill, etc.) and allow a violation of the privacy generalized in order to reduce coronavirus damage.
Net of all this, however, we must prepare for a wider spread of the disease and its economic and social consequences. Not surprisingly, Merkel and Johnson spoke quite honestly about the possibility that by 2021 two thirds of the population of their countries, but also of the rest of the world, will be infected. Already now, if the Koreans with their almost 300.000 tests have seen just about the ability of COVID-19 to spread, in Italy we could already have 80-100 thousand cases, for the most part asymptomatic and with an effective mortality of 3,5 %, as in Hubei. But above all with 12-15% of hospitalized cases. If we apply this data to the whole world, we get frightening figures: 5 billion infected, 500-750 million hospitalized, 150-200 million dead. All at a human and economic cost, more than likely, in the same World War II which, we remember, took the lives of 60 million civilians and fighters and presented - to the United States alone - an account in excess of the current 4.000 billion dollars .
Frightening numbers that require economies that at least try to work, because only in this way will they be able to invest to build more beds, build new hospitals, train more medical staff, buy new machinery and, in a year's time, produce billions of doses of vaccines and antivirals. If economies, as it seems possible, will end up engulfing themselves in an attempt to slow down the spread of coronavirus, then the scenario will be even worse if possible: entire industrial sectors will be destroyed as and more than after a lost war (in addition to the aforementioned tourism and air transport ...), taxes will rise to stratospheric levels1 to ensure the cash flow to governments indebted to the hair, almost all the most fragile countries will risk default, which would lead to the annihilation of the savings of millions of citizens.
For once, I really hope I missed the scenario. Above all, I hope that COVID-19 will slow down its spread during the summer season and that vaccines and antivirals can be produced faster than expected, a bit like what happened in 2009 with the H1N1 ("swine") flu. which ultimately caused "only" (so to speak ...) 575.000 deaths. After all, COVID-19, despite having hit 162 countries and territories by now, has caused just over 7.000 deaths. Unfortunately, growing rapidly ...
1 The highest incomes paid 94% tax rate in the United States in 1945 to finance the war effort ...
Photo: Defense Online
