On January 25 Luca Paolazzi published on FIRSTonline an article in which he points out how the danger of the Chinese coronavirus has been exaggerated: the mortality rate is very low, much lower than that of the Sars coronavirus of 2003, and in any case the flu (the coronavirus belongs to the family of influenza viruses) kills tens of thousands of people every year in the world without anyone fill the headlines with it. From which Paolazzi concludes that from this panic everyone loses us, except the media, who maybe make money with advertising placed next to the headlines on the virus. And he concludes: «Shakespeare would say: much ado about nothing. And we, more modestly, conclude that the media are the (virtual) infectors of the XNUMXst century».
The condemnation of one has recently been added to the deprecation of Paolazzi Professor of History of Medicine, Eugenia Tognotti, who wrote in «Stampa» about “collective hysteria”, and that “the symptoms would not be as worrying as those of Sars, so much so that WHO has decided not to declare an international public health emergency to date, as it did for swine flu and Ebola” (an international emergency which was instead declared a few hours after the article was published). It is to be hoped that in the coming weeks the risk communication challenge will not be lost by all the actors on the scene - concludes Tognotti - who have so far generated psychosis and excesses of alarmism. The difference between the deprecation of the excesses of alarmism between Paolazzi and Tognotti is that the first blames the "infectious" media, and the second condemns all the perpetrators on the scene.
I would like to note that it is premature to speak of low danger before figuring out what it is the speed of spread of the virus. Paolazzi writes that this season in the US there have been 2.100 deaths from influenza out of 4,6 million sick people, and seems to suggest that we need not worry about the 41 deaths (as of January 25, when she wrote; but now, until yesterday, are 213, and increasing every day) of the new virus. Tognotti says that the fatality rate of the Chinese virus is 2%. But that of normal flu in the US is, according to Paolazzi's data, by 0,046%. 2% is devastating: who wouldn't be afraid of falling ill with something that takes one patient out of 50 to the grave? Especially when there are no vaccines that exist for the flu.
Sars had a higher mortality rate and lasted for eight months. But, less than two months after the start, the new coronavirus has already infected more people than SARS infected from November 2002 to July 2003. I could, to arouse more mass hysteria, recall the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed over 50 million people, but that would not be correct: that was a perfect storm that could not be repeated in today's world. One could not repeat why today there is the ability to limit the spread of the virus. One could not repeat why a very useful and very justified paranoia it pushes all the actors on the scene to take measures and countermeasures to minimize the risk of contagion and spread (including the role of the media: "All the News That's Fit to Print", says the motto of the New York Times).
The famous Spanish flu of 2018.