Coronavirus is still far from endemic, experts say

In recent days, some countries have begun to talk about whether the coronavirus has become an endemic virus, something that the World Health Organization (WHO) and European medical authorities have denied.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) warned this week that the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is “highly contagious” and should not be relegated to “a mild disease”, and asked “not to forget that we are still in a pandemic “And not before an” endemic “virus, remember Efe.

Fernando Espinoza, director of the UEES Research and Consulting Center, indicates that the fact of beginning to talk about endemic It is incorrect, although he sees in this the intention of finally learning to live with the virus and not letting it control people’s lives and return to a semi-normality.

“Endemic it is something that is and is unique to a place (…). This virus cannot be endemic, and that is where they are making mistakes, because it is all over the world (…). The scientists who are giving the characteristic of endemic to SARS-CoV-2 is because of this characteristic that it would be located in a region and at a time. Europe had a good summer, autumn, and it is already seen that Europe is going to have large outbreaks of COVID in the winter. In other words, it is seasonal and regional, like the flu, ”says Espinoza, for whom it is time to handle the remainder of the pandemic well and prepare so as not to have to reimpose restrictions.

He adds that the omicron is not that it is milder, but that we have protection from vaccines and recovered that allows us to fight the virus in a different way. Although this variant will still give some immunity and “shields” to the population.

“As long as we have more than 3,500 million people without being vaccinated, the possibility of variants that are more aggressive and dangerous exists,” says Espinoza, who adds that it is not pessimism, but something that scientific data say could happen.

Meanwhile, Dr. Josefina Coloma, a researcher in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Vaccination, at the School of Public Health at the University of Berkeley, comments that COVID-19 is expected to enter an endemic cycle, which occurs when immunity generated by vaccines or infection is not “sterilizing”, that is, it does not completely block a new infection, but it does reduce morbidity or mortality. “Eventually COVID will be the flu for most people. In any case, we must think about the vulnerable, the elderly, babies and the immunocompromised, who will always be at greater risk. Similar to what happens with the flu ”.

“It is not possible to know if a new variant will emerge that further evades immunity and will produce an infectious wave again, but the way things are going, omicron is so, so transmissible that almost the entire planet will be infected and there will be millions of immunized to the time. In the future perhaps vaccines will be seasonal, along with influenza, and more than anything to people at risk. Hopefully, “adds Coloma.

Catherine Smallwood, from WHO Europe, explained that the intention to seek to call endemic, something that is not currently met, is to assume a certain stability of virus circulation at predictable levels and with predictable waves of epidemic transmission. But that the virus will continue to cause uncertainty in 2022 and everything will depend on how it responds to the advance of vaccination in the world.

Along the same lines, the head of the EMA’s vaccine strategy, Marco Cavaleri, affirms that we are still in a pandemic.

“We still have a virus that is evolving very quickly and posing new challenges, so we are certainly not at the point of considering it endemic,” Smallwood said, according to ABC.

Cavaleri recalled that the current epidemiological situation in Europe is “very worrying”, due to the increase in infections with both the delta and omicron variants, and urged European citizens to complete their primary vaccination, and those who have already received the full schedule , that they make an appointment for a booster injection, since this increases again up to 90% after a booster vaccination ”.

“No one knows when we will be at the end of the tunnel, but we will get there. The important thing is that we are seeing that we are moving towards (the possibility that) the virus is more endemic, but I think we cannot say that we have already reached that state; the virus still behaves like a pandemic virus, and the appearance of omicron is showing it, “adds Cavaleri, who believes that with the increase in immunity from infections, partly due to the rapid spread of the omicron variant, it could be “A lot of natural immunity added to that of vaccination” and then “we would be moving rapidly towards a scenario that will be closer to endemicity”.

Meanwhile, in the United States omicron is already the dominant variant. Anthony Fauci, the highest authority on infectious diseases in the United States and adviser to the White House, indicated that almost everyone, regardless of their vaccination, will be infected with omicron and, with exceptions, most will recover reasonably well. Although the unvaccinated were 20 times more likely to die, 17 times more likely to be hospitalized and 10 times more likely to become infected, unlike those vaccinated with a full schedule. (I)