Maltese Virologist Cautious On Italian Doctor’s Claims COVID-19 Has Become Weaker
Malta’s leading virus expert Chris Barbara has sounded a word of caution over an Italian doctor’s recent statement that the COVID-19 coronavirus is losing its potency.
“The mutations we have seen in the virus have been really small so far so we can’t really say it’s becoming weaker,” Barbara, who chairs the Mater Dei Pathology Department, told Lovin Malta. “However, we don’t know what other countries can find and we hope that what [Alberto Zangrillo] is saying is true.”
Barbara said he suspects the spread of the virus will slow down in the summer, not because of any significant mutations in the virus itself but because the heat and humidity will damage it when it is left on surfaces and because people will spend more time outdoors, where the virus spreads less easily.
Italian scientist Alberto Zangrillo
“We think it will quieten in the summer but come back in the winter, but it’s all postulations at this stage,” he said.
Scientists from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control will convene this afternoon, and Barbara said he is sure Zangrillo’s statement will be discussed.
“When a scientist makes a declaration, we take it very seriously but we have to speak with each other to make sure if everyone else is seeing the same thing,” he said.
Zangrillo, director of intensive care at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, dropped a bombshell yesterday when he said the virus has become much less lethal than it was a few months ago.
“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he said.
Zangrillo said his comments were backed up by a study conducted by fellow scientist Massimo Clementi, which Zangrillo said would be published next week.
“We have never said that the virus has changed, we said that the interaction between the virus and the host has definitely changed,” Zangrillo told Reuters.
He said this could be due either to different characteristics of the virus, which he said they had not yet identified, or different characteristics in those infected.
However, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said Zangrillo’s comments were not supported by scientific evidence and that there is no data to show the virus is changing significantly, either in its form of transmission or in the severity of the disease it causes.
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