We all know that the coronavirus isn’t an issue of the political left or right, and that the only way to fight it is not though ideology, but science. In our case, science should also be able to provide guidance for liability policies that are currently chaining up the entertainment industry, where executives and staff can travel freely for their own purposes, but not for company business.
Who then are you gonna call? Well, since we want to know if the coronavirus will still be a threat by the time the summer and fall TV trade shows come around, we’ll call on virologists from Europe’s pandemic epicenter: Italy.
In our view, calling on virologists makes more sense than calling upon the individual markets’ organizers, or, in the case of MIPCOM, the mayor of Cannes, who probably knows just about as much as the concierge at the Carlton, who, by the way, has already notified regular patrons that for MIPCOM, the hotel will have to work at 33 percent capacity.
For this reason we first report the findings of Professor Arnaldo Caruso, president of the Italian Society for Virology, who’s based at the University of Brescia, where he teaches Clinical Microbiology and Virology. Earlier in his career Caruso trained in the U.S. at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Caruso suggested that the virus could vanish even without a vaccine and that masks may no longer be necessary outdoors.
Seconding this view is Dr. Alberto Zangrillo, a professor of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care at the University Vita-Salute San Raffaele and head of the Anesthesia and Intensive Care Unit of IRCCS Hospital San Raffaele in Milan, who was quoted as saying: “The virus will die before the vaccine will be found. In reality, from the clinical point of view, the virus no longer exists. 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 on patients a month or two ago.” Here, he cited a study from Massimo Clementi, director of the Microbiology and Virology Laboratory at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan that is reportedly due to be published shortly.
Indeed, Clementi, was quoted as saying that, while in March the virus had a “700,000 strength,” in June it was reduced to 700. Other studies stated that, in order to be infectious, the viral charge has to be more than 100,000. Dr. Clementi also stated that “face masks are only needed indoors. Outdoors, social distancing is more important.”
Virologist Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, confirmed that today, the viral charge of COVID-19 is too low to infect people, and he cited a study by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that traced 790 people who tested positive for coronavirus and found they did not infect others.
Remuzzi added that today, in order to find out if people test positive, the results have to be amplified up to 38 times in order for it to be detected. In addition, he reported that these days the virus cells tend to die in a few hours.
All these studies, analyses, and research seem to indicate that the TV trade shows scheduled for the summer and beyond will be safe to attend, albeit with precautionary measures.
Leave A Comment