“After the winter, immunity will be so broad that the virus will not have the capacity to cause a new wave,” he ventures.
Robert Güerri, head of Infectious Diseases at Hospital del Mar assured in September that “de facto” the covid is no longer a pandemic
Christian Drosten, a leading German virologist and government adviser, stated this Monday that the covid virus has already become endemic and that with it the pandemic has come to an end. “This winter we are experiencing the first endemic wave of Sars-Cov-2 and with it, in my opinion, the pandemic has ended,” said the director of the virology area of the Berlin Charité hospital in an interview with the newspaper ‘Tagesspiegel’.
“Once the winter is over, the immunity of the population will be so broad and so resistant that the virus will no longer have the capacity to cause a new wave of cases in summer-, ha ventured Drosten-, unless it mutates again. “But I don’t expect that to happen right now,” he says in the same publication.
Drosten He defends, however, the restrictions introduced by the authorities to stop the spread of the pandemic, since without the reduction of contacts in Germany there would have been “one million deaths or more”.
The importance of vaccines
Asked about the situation in China, where the number of cases has increased alarmingly after the withdrawal of restrictions, the virologist highlighted the decisive result of the vaccination campaigns in Germany and Europe. “The big mistake in China has been that the population, particularly the elderly, has not been made aware of vaccination,” he replies.
China announced this Sunday that it will stop publishing the daily report in which, since the beginning of 2020, it detailed the new cases of covid-19 and deaths from the disease, after the rapid spread of the virus across the country has cast doubt on the reliability of official figures. “From now on, the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention will not release information about the pandemic on a daily basis,” the National Health Commission said in a brief statement that did not detail the reasons why it has taken this decision. decision. The supposed minutes of a meeting of the National Health Commission echoed by Bloomberg indicated that the real number of new daily infections could have reached 37 million and that, in the first days of this month, some 248 million people –18% of the national population– they contracted the virus.
Qualification with the days counted
Since this fall, virologists and epidemiologists have maintained that, although the WHO continues to officially decree the state of a global pandemic, the health crisis had already come to an end. Robert Guerri, Head of the Infectious Diseases section of the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona assured this newspaper in September that “de facto’ the covid is no longer a pandemic; that qualification must be withdrawn”, who considered two months ago that if the World Organization of Health (WHO) assured that “the world has never been so close to the end of the pandemic” (this was stated by its director general, Tedros Adhnaom Ghebreyesusthis September), it is because the body is “preparing the ground” to withdraw the concept of a health emergency.
The flu goes up and the covid goes down
Experts estimate that the flu peak will be reached around these holidays. The week of December 12 to 18 -the last for which official figures are available, the new ones will come out this Tuesday-, the flu reached a moderate epidemic level. Meanwhile, the number of those affected by covid-19 decreases due to the fact that one virus replaces the other. The peak of the coronavirus is expected after Christmas, once the flu goes down.
Appeal to prudence
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Even so, the covid-19 kept 930 people hospitalized in the week from 12 to 18 (64 less than the previous week), of which 51 are in the ucis (six less than seven days ago). And covid-19, epidemiologists warn, is still deadlier than the flu.
“Covid-19 was the most frequent cause of death in 2021, with 39,444 deaths Y it was also so in the first half of this year, with 20,915 deaths“, stressed this month Joan Caylà, member of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology (SEE)on Twitter in reference to the report published a few days ago by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).