Covid: broccoli, official cases are the tip of the iceberg

The unexpected wave of infections that disturbed the summer of 2022 could be much higher than the official figures describe: several factors contribute to causing this underestimation of real cases, such as the greater number of asymptomatic patients and the extensive use of tampons at home. it yourself. This is noted by Francesco Broccolo, a virologist at the University of Milan-Bicocca and scientific director of the Serpa Group.

“We have all wondered why this number of deaths is so high in the height of summer, as this trend continues to grow,” Broccolo notes. “First of all, we must remember that the number of infections this year is much higher than it was last summer, also driven by the increase in the transmissibility of the virus and the increase in the number of cases again: so it is inevitable that the number of deaths will be higher. It is not enough to explain the situation, but rather We should consider the official data to be only the tip of the iceberg.”

The virologist asserts that the unannounced is presented above all by people who do a DIY swab at home (not counted in official statistics) and by asymptomatic people, who “today represent 80-90% of cases while they were With the previous variants. 30-40%”. The expert adds that the strong susceptibility of the Omicron variants to transmissibility was also accelerating infection, “which bind more strongly to human cell receptors and give a long-lasting infection, thus widening the time window in which a person is infectious.”

“It is true that the sun and summer heat reduce the viral load on contaminated surfaces, but now – he concludes – we know that infection occurs in practice only by direct contact between people, transmitted by droplets of saliva. For this reason, if the mask is not used constantly, it is still You may get infected.”