What could have been a convention at the Italian Istitute of Culture in Westwood just a few months ago, had to become an online meeting. Due to the recent harsh situation the world has been facing against a deadly virus, journalist Valentina Martelli asked some Italian professionals who fought coronavirus first hand to partake in a virtual panel and discuss the recent turn of events in Southern California. Martelli moderated the meeting with UCLA doctor Emanula Bonfoco, therapist Alberto Collazzoni, UCLA professor Federico Raia and Immunologist Alessandro Sette. A beautiful Italian representation, in Martelli’s words.
To open the meeting Silvia Chiave, Italian General Consul: “In Southern California there is a great desire to start over again, to go back to our old life. But we are all aware we have to do it in a socially responsible way, so as not to fall back into the crisis of the last few months.” When asked about the role of the Italian consulate in helping out its citizens during this difficult time, she added that “The community gathered around the consulate, which helped us do our job better.”
But not only citizens’ lives have profoundly changed at the beginning of 2020, also doctors’ lives have been completely turned upside down by recent events.
Therapist Alberto Collazzoni who’s an expert in dealing with anxiety at the Renewed Freedom Center in Los Angeles, at first had to stop seeing his patients through in-person meetings. “Many of them stopped their therapy path, while others, especially the elderly, surprisingly decided to shift to online encounters. I also noticed that some patients decided to change their therapy goals, they wanted to change their daily habits.” According to Collazzoni, who’s been practicing in Los Angeles since 2017, frustration became an issue, especially for those who could not be as productive at home with children, as they were before in their offices. “On the other hand some patients experienced an improvement in symptoms after the lockdown. For example, those who suffer from social-phobia, people who feared being judged, are now forcedly avoiding situations that had to face before. But that’s a momentary relief in my opinion, there could be a rebound effect when returning to society.”
And the most common symptom that have been experienced by patients? Cabin fever tops all of them. “Cabin fever is a feeling of extreme irritability and restlessness that is due from living in isolation or a confined indoor area for a prolonged time. Beside this, most of my patients had anxiety disorders, uncertainty for theirs and their loved ones’ health, for their job. Last but not least we are seeing an increase in requests for police intervention for domestic violence.” And with regards with children, they appeared to have had the best response. “Kids are resilient and adapt to new situations.”
For Federica Raia, assistant professor and researcher in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, interactions were distorted because everything was transferred to platforms, such as telemedicine, new for almost everyone: “This new communication medium brings very interesting research data; the fundamental thing is the first visit through the screen, which is small, and seems limiting. The patient is required to participate actively, which increases the patient’s self-management ability; furthermore, there is renewed attention to public health, especially in the USA where there is a very fragmented system.
“Science is often portrayed by the media as a world of established and objective facts where puzzles are solved.” She adds “In this case, the situation gave the public the opportunity to understand that this is not the case. Uncertainty is part of the way science and medicine are done. Everyone eagerly follows development and experimentation. Public figures like the governor of California Gavin Newsome and Dr. Anthony Fauci have highlighted these uncertainties and also have continued working and communicating with the public, that has become involved. This can be seen in the acts of solidarity of people who spent the lockdown in the frontline of their family and community’s life. This emerges from concrete life experiences, which help fight situations like this in a positive way. The audience has matured. We have an interlocutor who urges us to move forward.”
A lot of things about Sar-CoV19 are still in fact unknown and had doctors working more than 12 hours a day. One of them is Emaunela Bonfoco, who is apracticing Family Medicine doctor in Santa Ana, who arrived in the States after graduating from Pavia Medical School, training as a surgeon for two years at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm and starting a PhD program in Neurotoxicology at the Karolisnka Institute.
She is sure that on a general level healthy patient responds better, that people at risk are the geriatric ones and the asthmatics, but the scenario that was presented to doctors was never, and still is, so certain.
“From my experience I have seen families with only two people seriously affected and the others maybe even negative. Statistically we do not know how to explain it, but it is certain that in families it often did not necessarily seriously affect everyone. The immune response is stronger if you have a good immune system, but we still don’t know how much it matters. There are different levels of aggression of this virus, healthy people who are intubated, so we do not know how to explain these things yet. Children have the lowest incidence, they are 10% of the infected. There are inflammatory forms such as Kawasaki that have been found in later sequences that are thought to be related.”
On the other hand, scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 infection, and epidemiologists are trying to predict how the coronavirus pandemic will unfold until such a vaccine is available.
“We specifically chose to study people who had a normal disease course and didn’t require hospitalization to provide a solid benchmark for what a normal immune response looks like, since the virus can do some very unusual things in some people,” says Alessandro Sette, professor at the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research in La Jolla.
“If we had seen only marginal immune responses, we would have been concerned,” he says “but what we see is a very robust T cell response against the spike protein, which is the target of most ongoing COVID-19 efforts, as well as other viral proteins. These findings are really good news for vaccine development.”
According to Sette, who has devoted more than 35 years of study towards understanding the immune response, measuring immune activity, and developing disease intervention strategies against cancer, autoimmunity, allergy, and infectious diseases, “The precautions we need to take at the moment remain the same: wearing a mask, keeping a social distance, avoiding gathering. On a global level, as the risk of a new virus without pre-existing immunity developing again in the future is known, societies need to set protocols and procedures as a prevention form.”
Donate