Fernando Simón sees reasonable “taking risks” in the current scenario of the pandemic

As he explained during the XXI Conference on Vaccines and Public Health, which is being held at the Literary Cabinet of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this decision has also been made taking into account that current vaccines have proven to be very effective.

The data shows it. At the beginning of January 2021, when very little population was still vaccinated, the percentage of hospitalization stood at an average of 8%. In August of that same year, with only people aged 50 and over vaccinated with two doses and the rest with only one, the level of hospitalization was reduced to 6%. During the last wave of omicron, hospitalizations have been below 2%. In addition, as Simón pointed out, “those who are being admitted now are more with incidental covid” that is diagnosed when they arrive at the hospital, which means that they are people “who have the infection but not the disease.” Namely, the disease is today between “7 and 12 times less serious” and vaccines have made it possible to reduce by 90% the possibility of death and hospitalization due to covid.

At the same time, the number of asymptomatic cases has increased compared to other waves. “In other epidemic peaks, asymptomatic cases represented approximately 35 or 40%,” explained the expert. However, in this last sixth wave that percentage has grown to 60%, without counting the percentage of mild symptoms, which is also “much higher than in the last waves.” “This changes the perspective of the epidemicSimon pointed out.

However, they do not prevent the transmission of the disease. For this reason, and “unless we get slightly better vaccines, we cannot eliminate the circulation of the virus,” admitted Simón, who insisted that, for this reason, “we must assume that there is going to be.” And it is that, as the expert highlighted, the coronavirus cannot continue to be an “excuse” for not recovering health activity. “We must take a step forward and recover the assistance because there are many people who have suffered a lot,” he specified.

But the pandemic is not over, and the virus “is not yet endemic” because for that to happen, it would have to have a certain stable situation, that is, without producing epidemic waves from time to time. “We cannot talk about the fact that the coronavirus has become endemicand that’s not because things change,” said the director of the Alert and Emergency Coordination Center.

In fact, for this reason, Simón insists on continuing to protect the vulnerable, in health and social health centers, and also in the event of infection.

He also emphasized that from this crisis we must “learn” and ensure that both from Europe and in Spain, the different parts of the health system “coordinate better”. He stressed that, in recent health crises of this caliber – such as Ebola in 2014 and 2005 or Cholera in 1992 – there have been improvements in international coordination, but “another step can always be taken.”

Fernando Simón also took the opportunity to defend the new coronavirus surveillance strategy that has been in force in Spain for the last two weeks. As highlighted, the change in the epidemiological surveillance of covid is due, in large part, to the distortion of the data generated by the self-tests. “The basic data to follow the pandemic is no longer worth usbecause we no longer know what they mean,” he specified.

Before December 2021, public health was capable of detecting between 75 and 85% of coronavirus cases in Spain. However, at the end of the year, self-diagnosis tests began to be used massively, and from then on “those we found were much fewer” because although “some” of these tests were reported, most of them were not “and we don’t know how many there are“.

For this reason, the Ministry of Health has now urged prioritize surveillance in patients over 60 years of age, both because they are the most vulnerable, and because “much less testing is done”. Something that, in the long term, will allow “stabilizing the series” and understanding with more reliable data how the pandemic has evolved in our country.

This change, as he insisted, is, for the moment, temporary (it will depend on how the pandemic evolves) and does not mean “that the pandemic is over”, nor does it “prevent any diagnosis”. Simón emphasized the latter, arguing that “a doctor can continue to request a diagnostic test for covid from anyone who requests it, as with any pathology.” Despite the fact that the time series and the coronavirus data -especially incidence- have lost the value they had before, what has not been done is the data in reference to hospitalizations, which have shown that today the risk of those infected to hospitalization is 90% lower thanks to vaccines. in fact simon disagrees that the omicron variant is milder and considers that the lower incidence of the virus in the health system during this sixth wave has a direct relationship with vaccines.

Simón has not entered to debate on the future of indoor masks, but he has insisted on the need for them to “stay” to be used when necessary. In his opinion, it is a measure that costs “very little” to apply and that “if we manage to keep it in place, we will be able to reduce the burden caused by some diseases, both in the healthcare system and in the ICUs and even in the number of deaths “.

In fact, Simón has not ruled out that the population will have to face a new variant of coronavirus in the future that “can destroy everything what we have done so far”. In this way, he recalled that “when a virus mutates it does not mutate to be more evil, it does so by mistake and they are random”, and if in those millions of replicas there is a mutation that favors it “it It will remain among us.” For this reason, he insisted on the need to vaccinate the entire world population as soon as possible, given that “”the less chance there is, the easier it will be for the bad variant not to come out or for it to take longer to do so”.