SPAIN is to start moving towards a new system of vigilance and control of Covid-19 once the current wave passes, Health Minister Carolina Darias announced this afternoon.
In a press conference following the interterritorial meeting with regional health ministers, the Spanish health chief explained that soon there should be a new way of dealing with coronavirus, viewing it as an “endemic” virus rather like the annual flu, instead of a “pandemic” as it currently is, with detailed daily records of infection rates and deaths.
The announcement goes in the same line as comments made on Cadena Ser radio on Monday by Spain’s president, Pedro Sánchez, who also advocates a change from pandemic to endemic, given that the lethality of covid has dropped from 13% to 1% between the first wave and the sixth.
Speaking at Wednesday’s press conference, Darias said: “It seems obvious that despite this sixth wave (of coronavirus) that we are in, the situation is not the same as other previous waves. The high cover of vaccination, the ever-increasing spread of the omicron variant and the incidences that we’ve had throughout the whole pandemic, are progressively changing the epidemiology of Covid-19.
“Given this change of the epidemiology of the illness we must be capable to anticipate new scenarios, and consequently we have to start to evaluate adapting to a new system of vigilance and control of Covid-19, once we have overcome this sixth wave of the epidemic in which we are immersed.”
The Valencia Report 