“The higher the numbers now, the more optimistic for the fall”
Prof. Gerhard Schneider, Director of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar, describes the current situation as very stable: “The high incidence should calm us down. We no longer see any very severe courses and only very few severe ones. We are working on one endemic situation. That means it’s no longer the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has terrible consequences. We now have a virus that’s going to spread and against which we simply need natural immunity. At the moment is So it’s not so bad that it’s becoming very widespread, despite all the disadvantages it might offer.”
With a view to autumn, Schneider explains: “The higher the numbers are now, the more optimistic I am for autumn and winter. Of course we can’t predict which new variants there could be, but if it stays that way, we have no problem. “
Virologist: “New variants don’t have to scare us”
dr Christoph Spinner has been closely monitoring the situation for two and a half years as pandemic officer at the university clinic and as a virologist. He also assumes that there is a very high probability that there will be new Covid variants in the future. They may have come into being a long time ago, science just hasn’t discovered them yet.
“But that in itself doesn’t have to scare us, because our immune system has various tools to defend itself against SARS-CoV-2. The probability that a more infectious variant, i.e. a so-called killer variant, will occur is theoretically possible, but from my point of view Very unlikely, because the immune competence in the population has increased significantly,” explains Spinner. It is important to ensure, through appropriate booster vaccinations or natural contact, that the immune competence in the general population and, above all, in people at risk remain high enough. So the probability of difficult variants would be rather low.
–
