“But swabbing everyone now is the bullshit of the century”.
So on March 15, 2020, in full lockdown, the then number two of the WHO Ranieri Guerra commented on the swab campaign via WhatsApp with the president of the ISS Silvio Berusaferro.
In the chat, in the proceedings of the investigation by the Bergamo prosecutor's office into the management of Covid in Val Seriana, Brusaferro replied to Guerra: "No, it's that everyone goes on their own". And the deputy director of the WHO reassured: «I spoke to Galli, then, and I told him to desist from proposing nonsense as tampons for everyone … he agreed, I hope …».
«The theme is that everyone thinks that the test is useful for something» , Brusaferro said on February 22, 2020, the day after Patient 1, in a chat with Francesco Curcio, director of the Udine Laboratory Medicine Department. At that time, the assessment was not to proceed with the "massive use of tampons", even though it had been communicated from London that "over 2/3 of healthy carriers from China remained 'undetected' and had time to spread the virus".
Brusaferro, that day, commented on the situation: "As you can imagine we are constantly in the crisis committee". And Curcio: «I imagined. We are prepared." Brusaferro: «The point is the systematic adoption of standard precautions, droplets area». The Director of the Udine Department continued: « Here the problem now is the overflow: in a couple of hours we already have a hundred test requests. We risk saturating the reception and diagnostic systems ». The President of the ISS replied, in fact, "the theme is already that everyone thinks that the test is useful for something".
«And then so with these numbers - observed Curcio - now, without a real emergency, I don't dare to think of the requests they will make when we have the first cases. We will quickly run out of materials». At the time it was decided to swab only cases of flu-like syndrome and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Furthermore, the investigators note in their report, Franco Locatelli, president of the Superior Health Council, "highlighted the futility of swabbing asymptomatic people and the Ministry made this indication its own, although on February 25, 2020, the technicians, including Brusaferro himself, had received an email from London on the problem of asymptomatics ». Also on February 25, the president of the ISS had stated in a message that «the controversy over all the flu-like syndromes to be buffered is breaking out! We need to quickly propose a solution."
According to the report, one of the reasons why the swabs were not carried out even then also finds an explanation in the fact that " neither the Ministry, nor the task force set up at the Cabinet, nor the CTS, nor the Regions, had foreseen the storage of swabs and reagents, but they had limited themselves to a simple reconnaissance of the existing. Nothing had even been done regarding the expansion of the number of laboratories capable of diagnosing Covid", so much so that in the first weeks of the epidemic "the swabs processed in the regional laboratories then had to be sent to Rome for confirmation by the ISS laboratory".
The chats of the mayor of Nembro Claudio Cancelli are also being examined , who wrote to an entrepreneur in the area on the evening of March 3: «I too would have been drastic about restaurants, bars, sports centers etc ... And instead the various lobbies have left open. Wrong. If you have to intervene, intervene rigidly, otherwise it's useless».
(Unioneonline/D)
