Two years ago, when the coronavirus pandemic began, Spain instituted rigorous orders to stay home for more than three months, and for weeks, no one was allowed outside even for exercise. Children were banned from playgrounds, and the economy virtually stopped.
But according to the Los Angeles Times, officials credited the seemingly draconian measures with preventing a full collapse of the health system. Lives were saved, they argued.
Today, Spain is looking at adopting a different playbook for dealing with the coronavirus. With one of Europe’s highest vaccination rates and its most pandemic-battered economies, the government is laying the groundwork to treat the next infection surge not as an emergency but as an illness that is here to stay.
Just over 80 percent of Spain’s population has received two vaccine doses, and authorities are focused on boosting the immunity of adults with third doses.
Not surprisingly, similar steps are under consideration in neighboring Portugal and Great Britain.
Spain’s center-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, wants the European Union to consider similar changes now that the surge of the omicron variant has shown that the disease is becoming less lethal, reports the Associated Press.
The whole idea is to begin getting out of “crisis mode,” and start moving forward into “control mode,” much like the world has done for the flu and measles. This will mean accepting that infections will occur and providing extra care for at-risk people and patients with complications.
“What we are saying is that in the next few months and years, we are going to have to think, without hesitancy and according to what science tells us, how to manage the pandemic with different parameters,” Sánchez said Monday, reports OPB.org.
Sánchez said the changes should not happen before the Omicron surge is over, but officials need to start shaping the post-pandemic world now: “We are doing our homework, anticipating scenarios.”
As for the World Health Organization (WHO), it claims it is too early to consider any immediate shift. Not only that – but the WHO doesn’t have any clearly defined criteria in place to declare the COVID-19 pandemic an endemic disease.
“It’s somewhat a subjective judgment because it’s not just about the number of cases. It’s about severity, and it’s about impact,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief.
Speaking at a World Economic Forum panel on Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases doctor in the U.S., said COVID-19 could not be considered endemic until it drops to “a level that it doesn’t disrupt society.”
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is advising countries to transition to a more “routine handling” of COVID-19 cases after the acute phase of the pandemic is over.
In a statement, the agency said that more EU states in addition to Spain will want to adopt “a more long-term, sustainable surveillance approach.”
Dr. Salvador Trenche is the head of the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine, which has led the call for a new endemic response.
COVID-19 “must be treated like the rest of illnesses,” Dr. Trenche told the Associated Press, adding that “normalized attention” by health professionals would help reduce delays in treatment of problems not related to the coronavirus.
“We can’t do on the sixth wave what we were doing on the first one: The model needs to change if we want to achieve different results,” he said.
