Darias insists on the Government’s plan to treat covid-19 like the flu, but delays the change until the end of the sixth wave
The explosion of infections due to the omicron variant is overflowing Primary Care, which has to attend to patients, but also process the discharge and discharge of sick workers. The central government has delegated to the autonomies the choice of initiatives to reduce the pressure of Primary Care and in recent days, several communities have already taken different measures to prevent bureaucratic procedures from saturating Primary Care professionals. “Each community must adopt its procedure”, recalled this Wednesday the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, after the meeting of the Interterritorial Health Council.
In Catalonia, people who process their discharge will automatically receive the discharge, although this will only be valid seven days later, at the end of the quarantine. In Madrid and in the Valencian Community, to cut the procedures in half, doctors can discharge and discharge at the same time, although the discharge is maintained for seven days. In Andalusia, sick workers can make the request for leave through an application of the Board and in Asturias, the inspection teams of the Principality’s Health Service will be in charge of calling those infected to carry out the procedures. Murcia, the Canary Islands and Galicia have also launched initiatives to free doctors from bureaucratic red tape. Since mid-December, two million people have been infected with covid in Spain, according to official figures, which, however, barely collect a part of the real infections because many positives with antigen tests are not computed by the health administration.
In addition, in the Interterritorial Council, Minister Darias insisted on the Government’s plan to begin to ‘flu-infect’ the covid-19, that is, to treat the disease as if it were an epidemic (limited to a seasonal period, winter) instead of a pandemic. “We are in a new phase and we have to move calmly towards other scenarios because, despite the current high incidence, the situation is not the same as in previous waves thanks to vaccines, the characteristics of omicron and experience,” he stressed Darias. In practice, Health would stop counting all infections to become a sentinel system, a surveillance network that issues weekly reports. Even so, the minister made it clear that this change will occur “when the sixth wave ends.”
But for the moment, the ‘flu’ has the rejection of international organizations, such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or the World Health Organization (WHO), which have already warned that it is a premature measure. “The covid is moving towards an epidemic, although it has not yet reached this status,” said the head of Vaccines of the EMA, Marco Cavalieri. “We are not at a time when it can be described as endemic,” says the WHO.
The main Spanish medical associations disagree on the ‘flu’. The Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine (semFYC) is in favor because «neither the health system nor society can afford to continue testing asymptomatic patients or those with mild symptoms and isolating all those who are positive, with the consequences that this entails. social and economic level due to massive sick leave of healthy people. We must end the exceptionality: Covid-19 must be treated like other diseases.
However, the Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians (Semergen) believes that “covid cannot be trivialized by saying that it is like the flu because it is not.” “With 242 deaths, it is not possible to think that the covid is a flu,” says José Polo, president of Semergen. The Society of General and Family Physicians (SEMG) also considers this proposal “hasty”.
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