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With the arrival of the Omicron variant and after a 2020 marked by vaccination against Covid-19, more and more voices suggest that growing immunity could lead the world to the end of the pandemic. What challenges are there still to achieve it?
Among the scientific community, more and more hopeful voices resonate. The arrival of the Omicron variant, which has brought exponential spikes in infections, together with the increase in vaccination in many countries, has led one to think that this could be the wave that marks the end of the pandemic.
And what would it take to achieve it? That a large part of the population is either vaccinated or has created defenses against Sars-Cov-2 through infection, something to which Ómicron is contributing at great speed. It is expected that in about three months this variant will cover “possibly susceptible” to get sick, according to Dr. Carlos Espinal, director of the Global Health Consortium, told France 24.
If a large part of the population creates defenses against the virus, the world would leave the pandemic to enter what is known as an endemic. That is to say, when a disease becomes part of the daily life of citizens with controlled or sectorized contagion peaks and ceases to be a threat to millions of people.
In an endemic, Covid-19 would become a disease like the flu, and in this scenario, health systems could concentrate on caring for the most serious patients, while the majority of citizens, although they would be exposed to the virus, they will either not get it or they will get it without symptoms or with mild symptoms.
For Dr. Carlos Eduardo Pérez, an infectologist at the National University of Colombia, the possibility of this scenario could materialize in “the second semester” of this year, according to France 24.
Espinal, for his part, is more cautious and points out that “until 80% of the world’s population is not vaccinated”, normalization could take longer and points out that a more aggressive variant than Ómicron could set back the progress made up to now. the moment.
Vaccination, the main weapon to defeat the pandemic
A determining factor in the transition to endemicity is the immunity that citizens have been acquiring, either due to mass vaccination or due to contagion.
A recent study on Omicron carried out in South Africa showed that the variant is 25% less aggressive than Delta, but the scientists in charge indicated that this was not due so much to the composition of the virus itself, but to the immunity that the viruses have been creating. citizens both by vaccination and by previous infections.
In this sense, Espinal emphasizes a call that the WHO has been making for months:
“We have to reduce and end the inequity that exists in vaccination programs, where there is an excess of vaccines available in many of the rich countries and there is a deficiency in low-income countries”, and indicates that the fact that there are countries such as Haiti, which has less than 1% of the vaccinated population -according to the Our World in Data portal- it continues to be a very high risk both for the national population and for the rest of the world, since it is in unvaccinated populations where there is more risk of new variants emerging that are even more aggressive than the current ones.
Regarding distribution, constant booster doses will not necessarily mean greater protection, Espinal indicated, referring to a preliminary study carried out in Israel, the first country to apply a second booster dose, which determined that citizens inoculated for the fourth time did not obtain greater protection than those who had a third dose and the expert does point out that reinforcements will be necessary in the future “with an annual vaccination.”
Another key point in the success of vaccination and the fight against the pandemic is the development of new drugs with broader protection against mutations, indicates Pérez. “Vaccines have to evolve (…) these vaccines that we have are very good, but they are vaccines that still need to break the chain of transmission, which is the most important point to stop the pandemic,” says the infectologist, who considers that these sera could begin to be ready in the coming months.
A new era of Covid-19?
However, the challenges do not end. For Espinal, even in the scenario of entering an endemic with controlled contagion peaks, what will mark progress will be public control of the disease. “The genomic surveillance of the virus is a very important point,” he points out, in the sense that health systems can quickly monitor and warn in the case of detecting more aggressive variants or new waves of existing mutations.
In addition to this, the director of the Global Health Consortium also warns that the world and global health systems now have the enormous challenge of recovering the advances that had been made in other diseases, such as measles or tuberculosis, which have become to rebound in the middle of two years of devoting all or almost all resources to defeating Covid-19.
Meanwhile, Ómicron continues to represent a great challenge for governments and health systems around the world, since as infections increase, so do hospitalizations, although to a lesser extent. For this reason, and although it is far from the start of the pandemic, experts continue to recommend social distance guidelines, at least until vaccination against Covid-19 is widespread and it has become an endemic disease.
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