A look at the curve plotting Italian “Active Cases” on worldometers.info1, setting the crosshair to April 30, confirms that our “sometime around the end of April” estimate for effective saturation of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Italy2 was very close to the mark if one considers average incubation time as well as typical time to testing.

Now it appears that even the small number of new cases that are still being registered nationwide are not really “cases” anymore, as the Italian newspaper “il giornale” reports,3 something which had already been hypothesized from observations of declining average disease severity in recent weeks. The pertinent passage translated into English:
Alberto Zangrillo, Chief and Director of Intensive Care at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, during his intervention in [Italian state television] Raitre’s “Half an hour more” program, said that “the virus no longer exists from a clinical point of view”.
This is the result of a study conducted by Professor Clementi, the director of the Institute of Virology at the University Vita e Salute of San Raffaele, and it is being confirmed by Professor Silvestri at Emory University in Atlanta: The swabs performed in the last ten days have results with an infinitesimal viral load from the quantitative point of view compared to the swabs performed on patients a month ago”.
For anyone understanding Italian, a recording of all that Professor Zangrillo had to say in the transmission is also available to be viewed.4
Meaning: The – ever and strongly declining – “new positive cases” in Italy are simply not “positive” enough anymore to cause any serious disease. Something which may be expected – with the respective time lapse – to happen in the still more seriously affected countries as well. It may thus be important to not just “count cases” from now on, but also to monitor average viral load in infected people very closely to identify the point where a wide consensus on ending all lockdowns will finally be able to be reached.
The above is just another indication that what matters with regard to “COVID-19” is viral load and viral load only, further confirming that our high-level conceptual approach to dealing with COVID-19 proposed on March 165 was indeed the correct one all along.
In future health emergencies, it should be contemplated to listen more attentively to clinicians and other physicians accustomed to viewing the human being as an organism rather than simply a mechanism readily lending itself to statistical analysis. The human organism is a highly complex logical formation – the most complex entity in the universe that we know of – that can only be comprehended in a logical manner. COVID-19 has, once again, evidenced the urgency to rise above the view once phrased by the first memorable biotech company, Genentech, which earnestly spoke of the human organism as “a collection of molecules”.
_____- https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/[↩]
- https://loico.com/why-we-have-likely-seen-the-bottom-of-the-corona-crash-in-the-us-stock-market/, https://loico.com/covid-19-herd-immunity-likely-much-sooner-than-expected/[↩]
- https://www.ilgiornale.it/news/cronache/zangrillo-virus-clinicamente-non-esiste-pi-1867001.html[↩]
- https://www.facebook.com/gianluca.iacolare/posts/10222905738543033?hc_location=ufi[↩]
- https://loico.com/the-logic-of-surviving-the-coronavirus-pandemic/ , later expanded upon: https://loico.com/additional-thoughts-regarding-benefit-throat-disinfection-covid-19-like-epidemics/[↩]