The very small densely populated spaces, such as the trenches of the First World War in which the Spanish spread, have marked historical moments in the history of medicine and, as far as we are concerned, sometimes in geopolitics. This is why we are now interested in it Online Defense.
The history of medical literature tells of an acute epidemic with an unknown etiology that matters little or nothing for geopolitics, but which will help us better understand the present. In the summer of 1976 this disease struck a group of veterans of the American legion gathered, for one of the events scheduled for the two hundred years of the American Declaration of Independence, in a hotel in Philadelphia causing 34 deaths out of 221 infected (over 4.000 veterans were present). Only later was it discovered that the disease had been caused by a bacterium called Legionella, which was isolated in early 1977 in the air conditioning system of the hotel where the veterans had stayed. Well, even today we have almost the same case, not of an epidemic completely unknown, but caused by the new coronavirus 2019 and represented by the approximately 3.700 poor christians - 2.666 passengers and 1.045 crew members - who were held hostage by the Diamond Princess Carnival Japan, a 115.000-tonne giant, nearly three hundred meters long, built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan for cruises in the seas of Southeast Asia.
The story is easy to tell: on the previous trip, a guest from Hong Kong had embarked on Yokohama on January 20 and sailed to Hong Kong, where he had arrived on January 25. Here, visited a local hospital six days after leaving the ship, he had tested positive for coronavirus on February 1. While aboard the ship, he had not visited the ship's medical center to report any symptoms or illness.
Since February 4, the ship and everyone on board has become a "forced guest" of the Japanese health authorities, a standard practice after a guest has tested positive for coronavirus.
Well, the sad story of these people, which ended in spite of themselves in the center of the world's attention, and the parallelism with the story of the "Legionaries" tell us a lot, because they allow us to make estimates on what is happening inside the People's Republic of China and that the leaders of that country largely do not reveal to the world.
To begin with, the mortality rate among the "Legionaries" in 1976 (15%) had not been very far from what legionellosis still has today in advanced countries: approximately 10%. Thus, the number of Coronavirus infected on the Diamond Princess, infected of which we do not know the exact clinical picture but whose number we know because it is not kept silent by Tokyo, is currently 136 cases out of approximately 3.700 passengers, that is 3,6% of the people originally present on board. Since coronavirus appears to have an incubation period of at least twenty four days (not two weeks, as mistakenly believed until yesterday) and considering that the ship left Hong Kong 16 days ago, the number of 136 cases is likely to grow significantly in the next 7-10 days.
If we focus on the 3,6% percentage of infected people and apply it to the entire Chinese population of almost 1.450 million people, mostly residing in densely populated areas just like the ship, we arrive at the beautiful figure of 52 million infected people, not to mention the healthy carriers and those who still do not give symptoms. In short, to the 40.171 cases officially accredited by the Chinese government, we realize that there is no shortage of not one, not two, but three zeros.
There is a belief in a "clock" that for ten days has "struck" three thousand new cases every twenty-four hours, while even novice medical students know that an infection always expands exponentially, because each individual can it infect multiple?
We believe a government that describes a "slow motion" growth of cases of new coronavirus infection, when even a newborn has been infected by the secretions of the mother and the universities tell us that the virus remains alive and aggressive even nine days after exiting the patient's body (v.articolo)? SARS lasted no longer than 96 hours ...
What about the entire quarantined provinces, as well as the ship's guests, closed in their cabins and with equally limited possibilities of movement?
Why ignore what the case of the cruise ship tells us, that is that in China the cases of coronavirus infection could now be as many as the population of a large European country and that - if the mortality of 2% is true - tens of thousands are people missing from the appeal now?
Or maybe ... our leaders behave today with China as in 1989-1991 with the Soviet Union, when the fear of the Giant's collapse led many to support the choices of the Muscovite leadership, such as the aggression against the Baltics, while not to see a great power slip in a period of dangerous instability? Thinking wrong is a sin ...
Photo: Twitter / Xinhua
