Travelers from China arriving in Italy will need to undergo a mandatory quick swab. it establishes aorder issued by the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci. Italy therefore joins India, Taiwan and Japan in the list of countries that have decided to "take precautions" and impose the obligation to swab. In the next few hours, a similar decision should also come from the United States.
The order of the Ministry of Health
In Italy some airports had already decided to "go it alone". Milan Malpensa had foreseen anti-Covid tests for passengers coming from China as early as December 26 and the same measure was announced this morning by the Lazio health councilor, Alessio D'Amato, for Roma Fiumicino. In Milan, tests have already been carried out on two flights. The result? “On the first flight – explained the councilor of the Lombardy Region for Welfare Guido Bertolaso – out of 92 passengers there are 35 (38%) positive. In the second, out of 120 passengers 62 (52%) are positive”. Now "we have activated the sequencing procedure - he concluded - tomorrow morning we will have the first results".
The order of the Ministry of Health therefore extends the obligation of a rapid antigenic swab to the whole country.
“I have arranged, by ordinance, mandatory Covid 19 antigenic swabs, and relative virus sequencing, for all passengers coming from China and in transit through Italy” wrote Schillaci. “The measure is essential to ensure the surveillance and identification of possible variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population. He will report in more detail during the Council of Ministers convened today ”.
The situation in China
The “China problem today must be tackled promptly and with international cohesion. The data, few and not very transparent, are creating fear in the international community, even the scientific one”. This is what we read in a document from the Spallanzani Institute on the "current scenario" of Covid. The fear “is that, in a country with a high percentage of unvaccinated people where they have been used ineffective vaccines which give a low protection of the population, such a strong exponential growth of infections can generate the selection of a new variant, much more immuno-evasive and transmissible ".
The risk, explains Spallanzani, is that the new variant "ferries the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 beyond Omicron, the globally dominant variant since the end of 2021”. Spallanzani also states that "at the moment, the little information arriving from China indicates that the variants that are fueling this new massive wave of infections are the same ones that have already been circulating globally for some time, therefore still within the sub-variants of Omicron".
A few weeks ago, the Chinese government announced the end of zero covid policy. In a few days the infections exploded. In the first 20 days of December they registered 250 million new cases, about 18% of the population, hospitals are collapsing and some studies estimate at least one and a half million possible deaths.
The fear is therefore that the high number of infections in a poorly vaccinated population could cause the emergence of new variants, dangerous not only for China, but for the whole world.
