The minister Carolina Darias and the regional councilors again address this Wednesday measures to face the pandemic at a time when the debate on whether it should be tackle now the coronavirus with a protocol similar to the common flu and it is pending to set the cap on the price of antigen self-tests.
The minister will appear at a press conference after this meeting of the Inter-territorial Commission of the National Health System convened with a generic agenda: decision-making on the epidemiological situation and vaccination against the coronavirus.
Yet on the table is regulation a price cap on self-diagnostic tests that the Government plans to establish on Thursday and the answer to whether it will be allowed from now on to sell them in supermarkets as is the case in Portugal and other European countries.
In the environment also floats the proposal in which the Government works to change the way in which the disease is studied and analyzed: the Executive wants “a progressive transition” from an emerging surveillance system to a sentinel surveillance system.
Now, the Ministry collects information on the situation in which the autonomous communities find themselves with respect to a possible development of the system, the resources that would be available for it and the deadlines.
However, this Tuesday the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that is rash to think of treating covid-19 as an endemic disease due to the uncertainty that still surrounds the coronavirus and the high transmissibility of the omicron variant, which could contract more than half of the European population within six to eight weeks.
Regarding vaccination, the Public Health Commission will study on Thursday the possibility of expanding the third dose of the vaccine, currently received by those over 40 years of age, to new age groups, as well as reducing the interval between this booster and the second dose below six months.