ZURICH, April 3 (Reuters) - Switzerland on Friday sought to speed access to drugs that could be used against coronavirus-caused COVID-19 disease with an order that allows them to be deployed in hospitals before getting formal approval by the country's regulator.
The decree covers generic malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine, Abbvie's HIV drug Kaletra, Gilead Science's experimental remdesivir and Roche's Actemra, all of which are being studied for potential use against coronavirus.
Italy: the real number of COVID-19 cases in the country could be 5,000,0000 (compared to the 119,827 confirmed ones) according to a study which polled people with symptoms who have not been tested, and up to 10,000,000 or even 20,0000,000 after taking into account asymptomatic cases, according to Carlo La Vecchia, a Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the Statale di Milano University.
This number would still be insufficient to reach herd immunity, which would require 2/3 of the population (about 40,000,000 people in Italy) having contracted the virus [source].
The number of deaths could also be underestimated by 3/4 (in Italy as well as in other countries) [source], meaning that the real number of deaths in Italy could be around 60,000.
If these estimates were true, the mortality rate from COVID-19 would be much lower (around 25 times less) than the case fatality rate based solely on laboratory-confirmed cases and deaths, since it would be underestimating cases (the denominator) by a factor of about 1/100 and deaths by a factor of 1/4.