A small town in north-east Italy has temporarily stopped all new coronavirus infections of its residents as part of a field trial. Vò near Venice was one of the eleven towns and villages in Lombardy where the Italian wave of infections started, as the British Guardian reports. From the 3300-strong community, the first casualty of Covid-19 in the country was reported in February with the 77-year-old Adriano Trevisan.
All of Vò quarantined for Corona
The Italian authorities had reacted massively to the news of the country's first corona death, the scientists Andrea Crisanti and Antonio Cassone wrote in a guest article for the newspaper on Friday. Crisanti is a professor of microbiology at the University of Padua, Cassone is a former director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Italian Health Institute.
The entire city was quarantined and all residents – even those without symptoms – had been tested, the experts described in the "Guardian" the procedure. "We ran the tests at the University of Padua. It became clear that it was a unique epidemiological situation – and an application was made to keep the city under wraps and to run a second round of testing after nine days."
The result impressed Crisanti and Cassone: "In the first test round, 89 people tested positive, in the second round the number dropped to six, who then remained isolated," they reported. Because people were quarantined before showing signs of infection, it was possible to stop the spread of the coronavirus in less than 14 days. "In this way, we managed to eradicate the coronavirus in Vò and achieve a 100 percent cure rate for previously infected people while no other cases of transmission were recorded," the scientists wrote.
"We made an interesting finding: at the time the first symptomatic case was diagnosed, a significant portion of the population, about three percent, was already infected – but most of them were completely asymptomatic," said Crisanti and Cassone. Her study brought the valuable insight: "Testing all citizens, regardless of whether they have symptoms or not, offers a way to control this pandemic."
New case of infection tarnishes success
The nature of the corona crisis means that a structured response like that in Vò is a key factor in the fight against the pandemic. At the same time, extensive tests by the population are essential to be able to say exactly how many people are affected and how high the mortality rate from the virus is. Only if you know exactly how many people are actually infected can you correctly state how high the proportion of fatal illnesses is.
On Friday afternoon, however, the success story from Vò was clouded: According to the Italian news agency Ansa, a resident was now tested positively in the village. The risk of Covid-19 returning even after a period without new cases is high, commented Pier Luigi Lopalco, professor of hygiene at the University of Pisa, on the setback in Vò. "The report of the new case could be due to a change of location or infection by asymptomatic people."
Swell: "The Guardian" 1, "The Guardian" 2, "Sky News", Ansa
This article was originally published on stern.de.