When Pedro Sanchez stopped at the pandemic during his speech in the debate of the state of the nation, last Tuesday, he did it on tiptoe, as Something almost from the past. An emergency that Spain had achieved “overcome” with “reasonable success”. The President of the Government pronounced phrases such as “we do not choose to govern in critical situations such as those generated by the pandemic”, “we are not going to forget the lessons of the pandemic & rdquor; and “we are going to put the economy and the State at the service of the social majority, as we already did during the pandemic & rdquor ;. The spokespersons for the parliamentary groups did not stop at the coronavirus either. that day they died 58 people by covid in Spain.
Hours after Sánchez finished his initial speech in the Congress of Deputies, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom, drew in Geneva (Switzerland) a radically different global panorama. “New waves of the virus show once again that covid is far from over & rdquor ;, said Adhanom, who also defended the need to take masks inside and apply quarantines to those infected, measures that the Government left without effect a few months ago.
Citizens get their Past life to the pandemic and political leaders focus their attention on other serious issues (the war in Ukraine, the heat wave, the price of energy), but the covid is still here, mutating and killing In fact, it kills more now than it did just a year ago. More of 12 times more. Between July 4 and 10, 2022, 525 people died from covid. On the same dates in 2021, 43.
The comparison has an arbitrary component. A year ago the infections they were at much lower levels than today, although it is impossible to know exactly how much. In March, the Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities agreed to stop counting the positives in the entire population and stuck to the older than 60 years the calculation of the incidence, which now stands at 1,158. Also is true that lethality is much lower, that those who get sick and die are often older and vulnerable people, that levels of hospital Occupation, Although they have almost doubled in the last month, they have little to do with those of previous waves. All largely thanks to vaccines. But the high transmission during 2022, due to the omicron variant and its much more contagious mutations, threatens a higher number of deaths this year than the previous one.
normalize the numbers
The Daily Mortality Monitoring System (MoMo) observe how many Spaniards die each day, comparing the figures with what would be expected according to the averages of the last decades. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, before the arrival of vaccines, it detected a excess mortality of 68,172 people. In 2021, from 24,490. In so far in 2022, of 16,619. And yet five and a half months left for the end of the year. Everything seems to be heading for a figure above 25,000.
While citizens and media normalize the more than 60 daily deaths by covid and acts of remembrance are called for the victims of the pandemic such as the one that took place this Friday in Madrid, epidemiologists and public health experts have been considering for some time whether the time has come to reapply some of the measures left without effect a few months ago. Especially, isolate the infected and wearing the mask indoors, which is now only mandatory on public transport and hospitals, a step back that neither the Government nor the autonomies show any signs of wanting to give.
No pressure or worry
“The situation requires review strategy globally and set a date as soon as possible for the fourth dose in people over 60 years of age & rdquor ;, explains Jose Martinez Olmos, professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health and general secretary of the Ministry of Health in the governments of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Martínez Olmos considers “justified & rdquor; recover quarantines and masks, but he does not think that something like this will be adopted, at least not in the short term, because “There is no great care pressure or social concern & rdquor ;. The current method of calculating the incidence, without counting the cases of those under 60 years of age, means that “the magnitude of the problem does not surface towards society & rdquor ;, and at the same time, he concludes, “there is also no Europe where to look to see different proposals & rdquor ;.
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“Rectifying is for the wise. We are not asking for a new lockdown. What is requested is that those infected do not go to work and put on masks indoors when there is no distance. The population must understand it. These messages should come out of the ministry very clearly & rdquor ;, points out Joan Cayla, of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology. If four years ago this expert had been told that there was going to be a new disease that would cause all these deaths a day, and that society would end up considering it normal, his response would have been: “Impossible & rdquor ;.
“Fortunately, the lethality It’s not like the first year. It has dropped a lot, thanks to the vaccines and to the fact that the variants are less bloody. But the virus affects many thousands of people, so it causes many deaths, Caylà concludes. Some say that since the lethality has dropped a lot, this is no longer important. That might make sense if there were very few cases, but there are so many. It is true that deaths are increasingly among older people, but there are 80 year olds that they were fine and would have liked to live longer. And the victims are not only the oldest. There are too many dead & rdquor ;.