Aussie medicos reject Italian claims coronavirus has become less lethal
Doctors in Australia are rejecting a theory put forward by two Italian physicians that the coronavirus is losing its potency.
Infectious diseases doctors in Australia are rejecting a theory put forward by two Italian physicians that the coronavirus is losing its potency and becoming less lethal.
Alberto Zangrillo, head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s contagion, said recent swabs from patients showed a markedly reduced viral load.
“The swabs 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 told RAI television in Italy. “In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy.”
Dr Zangrillo’s thesis was backed by a second doctor, Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in Genoa. “The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today,” he said. “It is clear today the … disease is different.”
Trends towards reduced viral loads have not been seen, however, in swab samples processed at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, part of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. A spokesman for the institute said “our experts haven’t seen any data to suggest this”.
Allan Cheng, an infectious diseases physician at The Alfred hospital and professor of epidemiology at Monash University, has also not seen such a trend.
The Alfred processes about 200 COVID-19 tests daily and “we haven’t noticed any difference in viral loads in people we’ve tested”, Professor Cheng said. “We’d be pretty surprised if that was the case. This is not a virus that mutates all that quickly.”
He suggested doctors in Italy might be seeing less viral loads in swab samples because people who were not very sick were increasingly being tested.
“It isn’t unusual that as numbers of infections decrease, you can test more people and … start to pick up more people who are not quite as sick.”
Meanwhile, the federal government has announced $66m in funding for vaccine development and treatments for COVID-19.
The funding from the Medical Research Future Fund extends $30m already pledged for the coronavirus research.
Extra funding for vaccine development has been awarded to researchers at the University of Queensland, and $7.3m has been pledged to nine research teams
Additional reporting: Reuters
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