Towards peak Corona patients Italy
Having passed the painful peaks of new SARS Cov2 cases and deaths, the long healing period for patients is keeping us waiting for Peak Patients to occur on April 14, at 99.000 total. This peak looked to become more severe only a week ago, but the government measures, and efforts of all Italians are paying off, keeping the pressure on hospitals and medical personnel at roughly current levels - we are at 93.000 patients in hospitals and at home today. We will be at these levels or higher until April 22.
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It is the rapid fall in new cases that is taking the pressure off, the key measure indicating social distancing has worked well, falling below 3.500 today for the first time since March 16. This trend is expected to continue with 3.400 new cases tomorrow, but with a long tail towards no new cases. This again means we are raising the forecast for total cases from 190.000 to 200.000. Another 70.000 cases to go with last registered case in the first half of July. The uncertainty around this is fairly wide, as it seems that we have passed the reproduction threshold of the virus at the end of last month and that it is on aggregate not able to sustain itself in Italy overall, but this is where the dynamics come in, and where it takes almost nothing to re-ignite the virus in a locality, after which one may risk restarting another four-month lockdown.
New Deaths bounced back to 636 today from 525 yesterday, but fell sharply in terms of a percent of the last five day average new cases, from 15% to 11%, well below the 14% average. We are currently in excess of 18.000 in total, and expect to arrive at 28.000 by July.
In theory, the virus should die out quickly in a homogeneous population, once reproduction ceases. We are, however in a peculiar situation where only a fraction of the population - 200.000 of 60.000.000 - have been infected by the time the pandemic is over. Even if the number of cases have been underestimated, there is a low level of contagion and so a huge exposure should the virus come back, as immunity has not been achieved at even a basic level. One scenario is that the virus will continue spreading in small cells for a long time, and so make it back into the main population centers. In practice, our forecast for the end of the pandemic in Italy assumes that there is no abrupt end to reproduction at the national level, as there will be local focal points appearing for another couple of months or so. This seems logical, but may not be plausible if the virus indeed is sensible to higher temperatures like we will see in the coming months.
The battle seems to be a great success for the nation, and for all the helpers from other countries. Yet, we seem to be in for a possible long period of putting out the fire, and for those in the front line the battle goes on. Today the ambulances seem to be as frequent as ever, and prayers go to all of you and your dear ones - in Italy and across the world.
The government announced a 400 billion Euro package for industry this evening, and the race is on for preparing for economic recovery. Balancing the pressures from industry to get back to business as usual with the ongoing pandemic will be a challenge for the government as confidence builds, while the virus keeps fighting for survival.