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LONDON – There are growing calls in Europe to treat Covid-19 as an endemic disease like influenza despite strong warnings from global health officials that the pandemic is far from over.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is the latest European leader to poke his head above the railing by suggesting that it is time to reassess Covid. He called on the EU to debate the possibility of treating the virus as an endemic disease.
“The situation is not what we faced a year ago,” Sánchez said in radio interview with Spain’s Cadena SER on Monday as Spanish students return to their classrooms from vacation.
He added: “I think we have to assess the progression of Covid into an endemic disease, from the pandemic we have faced to date. Mr. Sanchez said it was time to open up the debate around a step-by-step re-evaluation of the pandemic “at the technical level and at the level of medical professionals, but also at the European level.”
However, Sanchez’s comments mark something different from fellow leaders on the continent, with most of them focused on the immediate challenge of dealing with the alarming number of cases. Covid is caused by the omicron variant, which is highly contagious but appears widely to cause less severe cold-like illness than flu symptoms seen in earlier variants.
For example, France has reported more than 300,000 new cases daily in recent days, and Germany reported 80,430 new infections on Wednesday, the highest level recorded in a single day since the pandemic began, according to Reuters.
Sanchez’s comments echo comments made by politicians in the UK last year to Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the British public that they would have to “learn to live with the virus.”
With that in mind, the UK government has had to exercise restraint in recent weeks by not introducing new restrictions on the public, despite what Johnson described as a “tide wave” of cases. omicrons caused.
UK Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi told the BBC on Sunday the country was on “way from a pandemic to a pandemic” as the government said it could reduce self-isolation periods for those who are vaccinated. tested positive for Covid from seven days to five days (as with the latest guidelines in the US.) to reduce employee absenteeism at work and major economic disruption caused by Covid.
WHO warns there is no ‘endemic’ yet
Many epidemiologists and virologists have stated that Covid – first appeared in China at the end of 2019 before spreading around the world, causing more than 313 million cases to date and more than 5 million deaths – here to stay and will eventually become a circulating disease.
That means in the future there will be persistent but low to moderate levels of Covid in any given population in the future but the virus must not cause undue infectivity or spread. from country to country (which would make it a pandemic).
However, the World Health Organization warns that it is too early to consider Covid as an endemic disease. It warned on Tuesday that the global outbreak is far from an endemic stage as it is estimated that More than half of people in Europe and Central Asia could be infected with Covid within the next six to eight weeks as omicrons spread..
Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Dr Catherine Smallwood, senior emergency official for WHO Europe, said it was too early to show that the world was moving into an endemic phase of the Covid disease.
“In terms of endemism, we still have a short way to go, and I know there’s a lot of discussion around that right now,” Smallwood said.
“Endemicity presupposes that there is predictable, steady circulation of the virus, and that transmission waves are likely to be known and predictable,” she said.
“But what we’re seeing at the moment as we enter 2022 is not far away, we still have a lot of uncertainty to call it endemic. It could become endemic in the future. time to come but determining it down to 2022 is a difficult one at this stage.”
Smallwood noted that widespread vaccination coverage would be key to transitioning to such a scenario, but for now, endemicity conditions remain unmet.
Marco Cavaleri, head of biological health threats and vaccine strategy at the European Medicines Agency, the EU’s drug regulator, on Tuesday said “no one knows exactly when we will be at the end of the tunnel” under pandemic conditions that are becoming endemic, but added that progress is being made.
“It’s important that we’re moving towards the virus becoming more endemic but I can’t say we’ve reached that state, so the virus is still acting like a pandemic,” he said at a press conference. Translate.
“However, with an increase in immunity in the population, and with omicrons, there will be a lot of natural immunity going on in addition to vaccination, we will be moving rapidly towards a scenario closer to epidemics.” .”
Enhanced Conundrum
Vaccination against covid is still common around the world. While rich countries roll out booster shots and even discuss the possibility of a fourth Covid vaccine, poorer countries are still rolling out initial doses and many people are still not protected by the vaccine. Vaccinations have been shown to reduce the risk of severe infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.
According to Our World in Data, 59.2% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of Covid vaccine but only 8.9% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.
However, booster injections are not without problems, with scientists at WHO and other agencies warning that continuous booster injections are not a viable strategy.
The EMA’s Cavaleri said on Tuesday that “repetitive vaccinations over short intervals would not represent a sustainable long-term strategy.”
“If we have a strategy where we give booster injections every four months, we are likely to have problems with the immune response … so we should be careful with that,” he said. not overloading the immune system with repeat vaccinations.
“And second, of course there’s a risk of fatigue in the population with constant use of boosters.” Ideally, according to Cavaleri, “if you want to work towards an endemic scenario, then such boosters should be synchronized with the arrival of the cold season” and selected at the right time for flu vaccination.
“We will have to think about how we can transition from the current pandemic context to a more endemic one,” he noted.
