Spain opens the debate by wanting to turn the page and declare Covid-19 an endemic disease

The leftist government of Pedro Sanchez He is the one who spoke most openly about taking steps to start considering the coronavirus as a disease with which to live normally, like the flu, always clarifying that it was not an imminent step.

Spain “works with the scientific community” to, when the time comes, “move from managing the pandemic to managing a disease that hopefully science can make it endemic“, the president of the Spanish government reiterated on Monday, at a press conference with his German counterpart, Olaf Scholz.

The variant of the coronavirus Omicron it multiplied the cases as no other had done, but without so many deaths or hospitalizations, which has led many governments to ease the restrictions in the middle of the sixth wave, taking a few steps in the direction in which Spain is pointing.

However, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, replied on Tuesday that the pandemic “is far from over”, warning that “new variants are likely to emerge”.

The WHO also warned against the temptation to downplay an endemic disease.

“Endemic by itself doesn’t mean it’s good; endemic just means it’s here forever,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a virtual session of the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, citing malaria as an example.

Spain is in a good position to open the debate, having one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 90.5% of its population over 12 years of age fully immunized. “With a high vaccination rate, the pandemic can be overcome better,” German Chancellor Scholz admitted on Monday alongside Sánchez.

For Fernando García, from the National Center for Epidemiology and spokesman for the Madrid Public Health Association, to even speak of an endemic at this point “is creating false illusions,” he told AFP.

“We are moving towards making the virus more endemic, but I think we cannot say that we have already reached that situation,” said Marco Cavaleri, head of the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) vaccination strategy.

There is no numerical frontier of cases that separates an epidemic from an endemic one.

“Epidemia is when there is a very important outbreak of cases, above normal, which is what we have been experiencing since the beginning of 2020. And endemic are cases that may have a seasonal behavior, but that do not put pressure on the health system,” he estimated. Dr Garcia.

Nor is it written that a virus will evolve to cause less damage.

“The future severity remains a great unknown. There is no law that dictates that a virus must become milder,” said Antoine Flahault, director of the ISG (Institute of Global Health) in Geneva, on Twitter.

When the coronavirus is endemic, “most people will have mild symptoms, there will be a few who suffer complications that take them to the hospital and die”said Dr. Garcia.

“It will never happen that a quarter of the beds in intensive care units are occupied by Covid-19, not even 5%. It will probably be handled in the field of primary care,” Garcia said.

Spain currently has more than 23% of intensive care unit beds occupied by coronavirus patients, and more than 91,000 people have died since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, 2,610 of them between December 17 and on January 18.

Other professionals, on the other hand, have aligned themselves with the Spanish government.

“Let’s stop visiting and testing healthy people with minor symptoms, let’s stop tracking and testing their contacts, let’s abandon isolation and quarantine,” a panel from the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine (Semfyc) wrote in January in a article entitled “Towards the end of exceptionality”.

“All these activities, which made sense in the past, have been overcome with acquired immunity (both through infection and through vaccination) and the arrival of omicron,” they said.