The number of new cases of coronavirus infection “remains contained on the whole” said the conclusions of the weekly COVID-19 monitoring report of the Higher Health Institute (ISS), the Health Ministry and the Cabina di Regia control-room panel for the week of July 13-19.
“This is thanks to testing-tracking-tracing activities that make it possible to break potential transmission chains at an early stage,” it said.
“The reduction in the time between the start of symptoms and diagnosis makes it possible to identify the people who contract the infection and give them clinical care more quickly”.
The situation, therefore, is “positive on the whole but there are small alarm signals regarding transmission.
“At the moment, the data confirm that it is appropriate to maintain the prevention and control measures that have already been adopted”.
On the whole the overall picture of the transmission and impact of the SARS-CoV-2 infection in Italy remains one of a “low level of criticality with a cumulative incidence of the previous 14 days of 4.6 per 100,000 inhabitants”.
At the national level, a slight decrease in the number of newly diagnosed cases reported to the integrated surveillance system coordinated by the ISS was observed with a national Rt number of 0.95, which indicates that “transmission in our country has been substantially stationary in recent weeks”.
But the Rt estimates for six regions where recent outbreaks occurred are above one.
“The epidemiological situation, therefore, remains extremely fluid,” it said.
Specifically, nine regions registered an increase in the number of cases diagnosed with respect to the previous week and this “cannot be solely attributed to an increase in imported cases”.
In none of these regions, though, were signs of health services being overwhelmed identified and the outbreaks were swiftly identified.
The average age of the cases diagnosed in recent weeks is around 40.
“In part this is due to the characteristics of the outbreaks, which see increasingly less involvement of elderly people and entail a lower risk of health services being overloaded in the short term”.
Giovanni Rezza, the Health Ministry’s Director of Prevention, commented that “the number of coronavirus contagions is stable with respect to last week and the national Rt is just below one.
“However, there are still numerous hotspots of varying size in almost all of the regions and many of these are caused by people coming from countries of a high coronavirus incidence”.
This is why it is important for people to self-isolate “in quarantine if coming from high-incidence countries”.
Fonte Salute.gov.it News