Covid, Repubblica is criticized for Hope but only on Twitter
What the correspondent of the newspaper Repubblica wrote on Twitter about anti Covid policies in Rome and London
The number of Covid deaths continues to be a debated topic amidst conflicting comparisons, graphs and calculation methods.
On 25 April, the journalist Antonello Guerrera, correspondent from the United Kingdom of the newspaper Repubblica , published a tweet comparing the data from Italy and the United Kingdom, two countries that have dealt with the pandemic very differently.
Here's what he wrote and why comparing different countries is very complicated.
THE TWEET OF GUERRERA
On the day of the Liberation Day, Guerrera tweeted:
Italy has more deaths from Covid in proportion to the UK – which has renounced all restrictions for months and calculates deaths within 28 days of contagion (maybe you die from a domestic accident after testing and are counted as death for Covid). But woe to criticize Italian health policies. pic.twitter.com/nA3a5drfI4
– Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) April 24, 2022
The tweet is accompanied by a graph taken from the site that publishes research and analysis based on Our World in Data data in which the number of Covid deaths per million people is represented, even if – as the portal points out – "due to the different protocols and challenges in attributing the cause of death [in the countries considered, ed ], the number of confirmed deaths may not accurately represent the true number of deaths caused by Covid-19 ".
In the chart, for example, India is only in seventh place.
COVID DEATH COUNT IN ITALY
The issue of deaths and mortality due to Covid were also the subject of the question presented by Annamaria Parente of Italia Viva in the Senate on April 21 to the Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza.
“Monitoring – explained the minister – takes place with various tools. The daily one clearly takes place on aggregate data and essential data, which are communicated on a daily basis. Then there is a weekly monitoring, also managed by the Higher Institute of Health, much more complex, where there are also many numbers related to vaccinations ”.
“On the more specific issue of deaths and mortality – Speranza clarified – I want to recall an important work that has been done seven times so far and which is the result of a collaboration between the Higher Institute of Health and Istat. The last published report dates back to 2 March and is precisely the seventh since the beginning of the pandemic. Inside that report there are all the data that in some way was requested by the interrogation ”.
WHAT THE ISTAT-ISS REPORT SAYS
According to the latest ISTAT-ISS report cited by Speranza, "analyzing the European context, in 2021 the trend in excess mortality in the EU reached a peak in April (21.0%), therefore it dropped to 10, 6% in May and reached a low of 5.6% in July. A new rise was observed in the autumn and the excess mortality reached 17.7% in October and 26.5% in November 2021 (Eurostat data) ".
"Compared to the European average, – continues the report – Italy recorded a higher excess of mortality in November 2020 and March 2021. Starting from July 2021, the excess of mortality in our country falls well below the EU media ".
THE OPINION OF GILESTRO
However, continuing to make comparisons simply may not be correct because as the professor of Neurobiology at Imperial College London, Giorgio Gilestro, wrote in September 2021, not only "the arrival of vaccines has complicated the [European, ed ] scene to the point such as to make any comparison too uncertain "given that each country has adopted its own strategy, but it is also necessary to take into account" other layers of complexity concerning the behavior of people (eg: those who wear cloth masks, who FFP2) or the management political and social (eg: who has relied on remote work, who has not) ".
To explain what he said, Gilestro gives the example of the comparison between Italy and the United Kingdom: “We see an example of all this by comparing the Italian numbers with the English ones. In September 2021, the UK counted 910,000 cases – which, incidentally, equates to 11% of all cases so far since the start of the pandemic – and around 3,700 deaths. In the same period, Italy counted around 120,000 cases and 1,500 deaths. Basically, according to these numbers, Italy had just over a tenth of the UK's cases, but almost half of the deaths. How can this difference be explained? ".
According to the professor there are various interpretations such as the number of diagnostic tests carried out (in Italy fewer have been done but the United Kingdom has performed many in schools where infections have less serious consequences) or the age of the vaccinated ( in Italy, there are many more people over 50 who do not want to be vaccinated and who can suffer from a more serious form of Covid than in the United Kingdom).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/covid-a-repubblica-si-critica-speranza-ma-solo-su-twitter/ on Tue, 26 Apr 2022 09:18:54 +0000.