Declining deaths in Veneto provide clues to fighting coronavirus

At the end of February, Lombardy And Veneto Recording the first local incident in Italy regarding the transmission of the coronavirus, the two regions soon established a road blockade and established the first blockade in Europe and a precedent for the rest of the continent.

Since then, the fate of the two wealthy neighbors EuropeIs branching.

Military truck robbed a corpse from a city after a human catastrophe not seen in Europe outside the war BergamoThe mortality rate in Lombardy is 17.6%.

The nearby Veneto stand is 5.6%. Virologists warn that the rate of mortality is closely linked to the level of testing, but also say there are gaps in other factors, such as resistance to hospitalization of Veneto compared to neighbors .

“Veneto has very low mortality compared to other regions Italy, “Said the professor. Andrea Crisanti, A leading virologist at the University of Padua, responsible for large-scale testing programs throughout Veneto. “This shows that our approach has worked so far.”

As of Saturday, Lombardy, with a population of 10 million, made up 8,656, or 56.3%, of the 15,362 declared deaths from an Italian virus. Veneto, on the other hand, has a population of 4.9 million and 607 out of 10,824 diagnosed cases have officially died.

Extensive testing

Higher levels of testing and tracing in Veneto are the most widely cited explanation of why the region was able to control its occurrence more effectively than its neighbors.

LucazaiaItaly, the Governor of Veneto, was the first regional chief to devise a wide range of testing programs, including drive-through swabs in cars and testing in medical centers.

They acted inconsistently who Guidance that advises you to test only suspicious cases. Based on the advice of scientists in the area, Veneto has so far performed 133,289 tests as of Saturday, despite Italy accounting for half of the population, after 141,877 in Lombardy. The second highest.

Still, experts say that low mortality is not the sole reason for testing.

Venetian physicians also quote the region’s expertise in infectious diseases. This dates back to a pioneering history dealing with viruses arriving at the port from the east. The term quarantine comes from the quarantena, which means “40 days” in Venetian, or the time when a ship arriving from its destination in the plague was quarantined.

For Giorgio Paro, one of Europe’s leading virologists and a scientific adviser to the Governor of Veneto, a key factor is the number of patients diagnosed and hospitalized.

Palù says that in Lombardy, about 65% of patients were diagnosed as admitted to hospital for clinical treatment at the onset of an outbreak.

This is 20% in Veneto, and the majority were told to stay home unless urgent care was needed.

“There were various instructions given to the sick by various health authorities in the area,” he said. “Yes, more tests were done in Veneto, but people were at home and were not taken to the hospital. The more patients who were hospitalized, the more cases they had. You create an outbreak, because no care was taken to sample doctors and nurses, [so] You were bringing the infection home. “

His observation is that more than 60 Italian doctors and health care workers have died, most of which have died in Lombardy. Last month, a group of doctors at Bergamo’s Papagiovanni XXIII hospital warned that the hospital was a major source of Covid-19 infection and called for more patients to be treated at home.

“We are learning that hospitals may be the major carriers of Covid-19,” they wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. “The number of infected patients is growing rapidly, which will help infect non-infected patients.”

Political pressure

He says that the Veneto region has a large network of small medical centers that have been used to diagnose and treat patients out of large hospitals.

He argued that the fact that Lombardy had a higher proportion of private hospitals than Veneto also contributed to the increase in Covid-19 patients arriving at the hospital. The Lombardy administration was also under political pressure, he added.

“In Lombardy, there was too much entry from the triaged primary side. Initially, the Italian Prime Minister criticized the hospital in Lombardy, treating them instead of telling them to stay home. He said he wanted to show that

Lombardy officials also said that Rome should have done more. “I put on a mask on the TV and they insulted me and told me that I would undermine the credibility of Italy,” the Governor of Lombardy said Attilio Fontana this week. “Maybe I should have been tougher by opposition [central] government. “At the end of last month, Lombardy set up a medical team to monitor home patients discharged from the hospital.

The mood in both regions is still gloomy. “Have we made an error? Of course there is.” Julio Galera, Last week’s director of welfare in Lombardy. “We have always done our best to provide the necessary care to the many people arriving at the hospital … we did everything we could.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020