In Italy, “the virus no longer exists from a clinical point of view”

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”.

1. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/[↩]
2. 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/[↩]
3. https://www.ilgiornale.it/news/cronache/zangrillo-virus-clinicamente-non-esiste-pi-1867001.html[↩]
4. https://www.facebook.com/gianluca.iacolare/posts/10222905738543033?hc_location=ufi[↩]
5. 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/[↩]