Spain leads calls for Covid-19 to be treated like flu

FILE PHOTO: Elderly women wearing face masks walk along a street amid the coronavirus disease pandemic in Madrid, Spain, January 12, 2022. REUTERSPIX: Spain is spearheading calls for governments to start tackling Covid-19 as any other endemic respiratory virus like seasonal flu, despite WHO opposition and warnings that the approach is premature.

Spain is in a good position to open the debate, having one of the world's highest vaccination rates with 90.5 per cent of its population over the age of 12 fully immunised. The country is working with the scientific community to eventually shift from “managing a pandemic to managing a disease which we hope science will reclassify as an endemic illness”, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said this week.

Arguing “we must learn to live with Covid” in a similar way to seasonal flu, British Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the government would set out a long-term plan for living with coronavirus within months.On Tuesday, however, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that the pandemic was “nowhere near over”, warning that new variants were still “likely to emerge”.

Fernando Garcia, an epidemiologist and the spokesman of a public health association, warned that talk of treating Covid-19 as an endemic illness at this stage was “creating false hope”. “An epidemic is when there is a very significant outbreak of cases, above the normal, which is what we have experienced since the beginning of 2020,“ he said.Nor is it a foregone conclusion that the virus will evolve to cause less harm.“Future severity remains a big unknown. There is no law dictating that a virus must become milder over time,“ Antoine Flahault, director of Geneva’s Institute of Global Health, wrote on Twitter.

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