This Tuesday the Government will approve the decree that will allow a step, as symbolic as it is palpable, in the progressive normalization of daily life under the sign of covid-19: the elimination of the obligation to wear a mask in closed spaces, with exceptions such as public transport, hospitals or nursing homes. It could be thought that the message of relaxation could make it more difficult for the measures still in force to continue to be assumed in the situations in which they are still necessary. But this is most likely not the case if one takes as a reference what happened at the time when it was allowed to circulate without a mask outdoors, when part of the population preferred to maintain its use, voluntarily, as a precaution, in circumstances in which it was no longer forced.
The measure is taken at a contradictory moment. With hospitalization figures happily at a minimum but with a virus circulation still noticeable, with an average cumulative incidence in Spain in the last 14 days of 391 per 100,000 inhabitants. The data for the next few days, if they can be traced, must certify to what extent the reduction in the use of the mask has an impact and whether or not it negatively affects the strategy of focusing efforts practically only on the protection of the most vulnerable population.
We could say that the removal of the masks finally also indoors, with the exception of potentially risky spaces, is the signal that marks that we are already in a post-pandemic situation. But the WHO reminds us that we have not left the pandemic behind and the figures of infections in Spain confirm it. Although we have reached a point in the covid-19 pandemic when the evolution of the number of infections has been decoupled from that of the number of deaths, admitted to hospitals and admitted to intensive care units.
The spread of the virus, according to the indicators that are supposed to allow it to be detected even at a time when the notification and accounting of cases has been extremely deactivated (positivity, or the reproduction rate Rt used in the case of Catalonia), is on the rise, without worsening the situation in hospitals. That will be so as long as the effectiveness of vaccines is maintained, and as long as new variants of the virus do not emerge that are not only more contagious as the omicron has already been, but that can evade the effect of the vaccines administered to date. And there is no guarantee that this will not happen, as the WHO emphasizes by maintaining the degree of pandemic alert.
In this context, it would be problematic if the message of normalcy and relaxation spread too lightly: but, although with increasing reluctance, impatience and discomfort, we have shown that every time it has been necessary to take a step back and recover measures that had been lifted or keep the ones that we thought were going to fade soon we have acted more responsibly than unconsciously.
More worrying is the fact that the Changes in criteria on notification of positives and isolation of cases with few or no symptoms, as some dissenting experts warn, may make it difficult to detect future changes in the evolution of the disease, to the point that it could prevent us from react in time before a new mishap that at the moment is not yet on the horizon.