Covid tests, real numbers and vaccine campaign
Italy and Covid: the “Real” situation, part II
Update on the situation while the vaccine campaign progress and the country start to “open”
On the 26th of February, I published one article, where I explained my data model analysis and how, by adjusting the numbers relative to the moving average of the tests performed, I could find out how the “real” situation looked like. Please refer to the link here if you want to better understand how I do my calculations, and why I believe the numbers I get are more realistic as opposed to the official statistics.
At that time, I closed by telling that we were probably about to face the third wave. Now that we are in the middle of May, I can confirm indeed that we had a third way, but luckily it seems that the closures adopted by the government were good enough to limit first and than reverse the course of the curve. Now we are anyway starting to further open the country and hopefully the economy, so I want to try and see how data are changing, and what risk we are facing in the coming summer.
Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign is also on the go, so we need also to take care of this aspect. The idea, or at least the hope, is that even if there will still be circulation of the virus, the weaker part of population will be safe from now on.
Daily Numbers and “Real Positives” numbers
On the 26th of February, the graph showing the number of Daily “Real Positive Cases”, adjusted on the moving average of tests performed, was this one:
Now, the graph look like this:
We can easily notice how the third wave have developed, but it was less intense and short lived when compared when the previous waves.
Number of Deaths and Recovered cases
The official number of Death on the 26th of February was 96.974, while my calculations suggested that the real toll was close to 180.000. At that time, we were having on average around 285 deaths every day, but as I was warning, the third wave was just beginning.
This was the graph regarding the daily Deaths:
We arrived at the pick of new daily cases at around half of March, while the pick of death was around middle of April, with something like 480 deaths as a 7 days moving average.
The difference between the pick in number of cases and deaths, is due to the incubation period and the time Covid need first to develop inside the body, then to take the situation to a critical level.
Here is the graph updated:
While the official counting is now at 123.745, my calculation gives me a much higher number, of around 240.000.
Now the average daily number of deaths stand to around 212 and is decreasing steadily.
How many people really had Covid in Italy?
I understand that this number seems crazy high to most of the people, but again, we must remember that, specially at the beginning, we were totally unprepared to face the situation, and many people died without ever being tested for Covid. To understand where the reality lies, I believe is important to examine the following concepts:
- On the 5th of march, ISTAT have published a study on 2020 Mortality in Italy. The total of people who died in 2020 in Italy, is the highest ever registered since WWII: 746.146 people died. This number represents 100.526 more deaths, than the average of the period 2015–2019. In January and February, where Covid since didn’t started in Italy, the number was in fact 7600 lower than the average, so to better understand the impact of Covid, is better to consider the period from March to December, where the excess mortality compared to the average was of 108.178 deaths.
- On 31st December, the official Deaths number was at 74.141, therefore we can say with some certainty, that since the beginning the official tracking system, was unable to find at least 34.000 deaths connected to Covid.
- While the official mortality Rate in Italy stands around 3%, this would represent at least 1.1 Mln of cases that were not detected. Official mortality Rate around the world is now around 2,35%, so this would represents 1,5 Mln of cases.
- At 31st December, the official number of “Positives” tests, was 2.1 Mln. This means that possibly the real number was instead between 3,2 and 3,7 Mln. My calculations give me 3,35 Mln, so I think they make sense.
For the same reasons, we can imagine that even if we are now much more effective in the testing practices, whit the average number of daily tests which have ramped up from the 2–3000 of the very beginning, to an average of 141.000 now, and with something around 300.000 in the last couple of months, we might still be missing a big chunk of cases.
Today, the official counting talk about 4.1 Mln people total who have or had Covid, while according to my calculations, the symptomatic cases are 5.4 Mln, but the total number including the asymptomatic is something around 11 Mln, or 18% of Italy population!
What is happening right now and what should we do
Since last 26th of April, the country is slowly starting to be more “open”.
Cases seems to continuing the down trend, and this is very good. But we must be very careful. As we know very well by now, the incubation period of Covid is around 2 weeks on average. Another week is needed to develop bad symptoms, and in yet another week, situation may become quite severe and tragic. Therefore, considering the opening starting from 26th of April, we are now at the critical time, where we will see if the trend will continue bringing numbers down, or there will be a reversal and a forth wave will start.
If this reversal do happen, within the end of May situation will become worrying again, and by the middle of June we might be forced to a new closure.
But there is an important piece of the puzzle which is now much better than before, and that is the situation of the Vaccine campaign.
When I published last article on the 26th of February, only 4 Mln shots were delivered. Today, we are at 26 Mln, with 8 Mln people who are fully vaccinated, and another 10 who received the first shot. We can say that 18 Mln people have now some form of immunization, and this represents 30% of population.
New studies coming out are also proving that the antibody can last for at least 8 months. This is true not only for people who got a vaccine, but also for people who had Covid. As we have seen, this number is also quite high, probably around 11 Mln, or 18% of population. Since the mortality is much higher in the older part of population, the 10,8 Mln ppl who got Covid and survived, are most certainly in the younger side of population, which is also the part that still didn’t get access to vaccines.
We can therefore consider that the total number of people who have antibodies right now, is somewhere between 40 and 50%.
I believe that when we will cross 50% in the vaccination campaign, we will be on the right path finally, and situation can really start to improve.
I am confident that even if the virus will still be present, at least we will have a much lower mortality from now on, having put the weaker part of the population into a safety zone. Even if we could experience a forth wave very soon within next month, we could anyway see the mortality keep going down, until the point where we could be able to resume a “normal” life.
The bigger risk that we are facing right now opening up the county is anyway the fact that Covid virus tends to replicate with mistakes, which forms new variants. We have seen how the so call “English” one seemed to spread faster. The risk is that a new variant might be slightly different from the one that the vaccine can protect us from.
We need to be very cautious also to another thing. The vaccine do not protect us against contracting Covid. It protect us from getting very sick and possibly dying from Covid. Even with vaccine, we must keep being vigilant and keep some distance from other people, keep using masks probably for a while, possibly one or more years, until this bad chapter of our lives will be in our past.
Lastly, as the antibody seems to last for at least 8 months, this also means that the vaccine campaign from one side should proceed as fast as possible right now, and from the other side we should expect that we will need to make some additional shot along the way, to keep our bodies ready to fight and finally win once and for all.