“In Italy the Covid situation does not give particular concern, with stable or declining hospital indicators”, and the alarm for the spread of XBB.1.5 or ‘Kraken’ “is not a risk for Italy and for Europe “. This was written in a letter to the editor of the ‘Journal of Medical Virology’ Antonello Maurotti, full professor of Statistics at the Lumsa University; Massimo Ciccozzi, head of the Medical Statistics and Epidemiology Unit of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the BioMedico Campus in Rome; Francesco Branda of the Department of Computer Engineering, Electronic Modeling and Systems Engineering of the University of Calabria, and Fabio Scarpa of the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Sassari.
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“However, to avoid new sudden and unexpected flare-ups with unknown consequences – underline the Italian scientists – it is essential to have reliable and timely data also from China on the mutations of the virus and on the prevalence of the individual variants. This in order to have realistic forecasts on the evolution at short term of the epidemic, so as not to have to chase Sars-CoV-2 as happened in the past. China continues to be scary, but now we have the tools to anticipate, monitor and manage the pandemic”.
“The ‘Kraken’ sub-variant has not caught on in Italy and in Europe and this is confirmed by the Gisead data – Maruotti specifies to Adnkronos Salute – In Europe it stops at 6% and in Italy it is below 2%. The one that continues ‘Cerberus’, now predominant, is growing. But we must be calm, in Italy there is a very high vaccination coverage”. According to Ciccozzi, “Italy’s problem is usually the one we have to sequence the most, but the ISS knows it and I imagine it will work on this front. I remember this because we are close to the Chinese New Year and therefore – he concludes – we need to be very careful in the swabs of incoming passengers and monitor carefully what is happening” .
