The president of the Spanish Society of Immunology and head of the Immunology service at the Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital, Marcos Lopez Hoyosrules out going back to restrictions to control the increase in cases of coronavirusbut is committed to maintaining the health recommendations and continuing to behave responsibly, because “The virus is here to stay and we are going to have covid for a long time.”
“It would be important not to be obsessed, but not to relax to an extreme degree,” He said this Sunday in statements to RNE collected by Europa Press after remarking that “what this virus has taught us is that every time we give it a little air, it uses it to expand” and generate new variants.
And he believes that now “we are relaxed” and, therefore, the virus “is free”, because “we all have someone we know who is infected”. Despite this, immunologists “do not ask for restrictions at all” due to the need to resume the economy and social life, since “if not, we will have another type of pandemic”, but “We must not downplay the virus” and maintain measures such as ventilation, the use of face mask in crowded places or avoid social contacts.
Along the way, he remarked that “no one has taken away the title of health emergency” and that increasingly more infective variants appear, which although thanks to the vaccine they cause less serious infections, but they do take vulnerable people to hospitals.
López Hoyos has pointed out that “it is not that we have done anything wrong” so that waves of infections continue to occur, but that “we have been in the pandemic for two and a half years and we are all exhausted”, including health.
Vaccine “pancoronavirus”
He also believes that both politicians and society “have relaxed” when supporting the science and has stressed the importance of continuing to invest and “once the worst crisis is over, we don’t forget.”
In this regard, he highlighted that The current challenge is to achieve a ‘pancoronavirus’ vaccine, that works regardless of the variant and that manages to avoid infection, not just disease like those currently existing. However, he does not know when it can be achieved and warns that for this “what you have to do is invest.”
“The virus has always been ahead of us”
López Hoyos also hopes that the Spanish Hipra vaccine will see the light of day in September and October, which has “very good prospects and is very likely to give us the chance to introduce a variation in the vaccination schedule” for the booster dose. which is expected in the fall.
The immunologist “is not clear” that this dose has to be for the entire population and is committed to starting with vulnerable people, with pathologies and the elderly. “The rest, we will see”, because “this is being in real time”. “The virus has always been ahead of us,” he has acknowledged, noting that “it is still very difficult to predict” what the pandemic will be like in the future.
–
