‘Covid should be treated like flu’

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. 

With governments and populations worldwide desperate for an end to the pandemic, discussion about when the virus might be reclassified has intensified.

"Spain wants to lead this debate because it is timely and necessary to do so," Health Minister Carolina Darias has said, adding that Spain asked the European Centre for Disease Prevention (ECDC) to "study new strategies" to deal with Covid.

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.

But the question has sparked disagreement between governments seeking some sort of normality and some parts of the medical community which advocate keeping its guard up.

The United States on Wednesday also reported that the latest wave of cases driven by the Omicron variant appears to be receding. The fast to rise, fast to fall graph could follow the same pattern seen in other countries hit by the highly-mutated strain.

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".

The WHO also warned against the temptation to play down the seriousness of an endemic disease.

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".

Meanwhile, a study conducted and published by The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday showed that people who were unvaccinated but survived Covid were better protected than those who were vaccinated and not previously infected.

The study, which was done before the emergence of the Omicron variant, showed that protection was highest among those who had both vaccination and prior Covid.