The new “Surveillance and control strategy against covid after the acute phase of the pandemic”, approved last Tuesday by the Public Health Commission, marked the definitive goodbye to a series of protocols and routines that have been part of our daily lives since the worst omens of the pandemic became a reality.
It is, as the report presented by the Ministry of Health revealed, “accept a certain level of transmission” among the vaccinated, young and healthy population to focus only on the most fragile people. A transition to a new scenario that leaves behind a modus operandi that has been with us since the start of the pandemic.
Thus, since this Monday the tests and isolations of generalized positives have ended. Testing has already been reduced and contact quarantines have ended. All this will affect the public databecause many infections will not be counted, only serious ones or in residences.
We say goodbye to the daily reports provided by the Ministry, we say goodbye to that swarm of numbers that we deciphered every afternoon in order to better understand the ravages of the pandemic. Numbers that are lives, frustrated and future plans in suspense. Numbers that allowed us to limit the tragedy, outline the confusion.
Skepticism among doctors
Not everyone is satisfied with this roadmap. Doctors and experts believe that this new surveillance and control strategy It implies going back to pre-pandemic scenarios, in which the patient had no choice but to go to the clinic with a view to identifying the disease.
A strategy that, family doctors lament, means losing two years of advances in diagnostics, two years that have made it possible to establish protocols that have saved lives and that, if they disappeared, would make many infections go unnoticed by doctors.
But not only that. The new measures, which in principle have among their objectives to alleviate the workload carried by health personnel, could have the opposite effect. Getting to the point; bureaucratic burden centers are lightened, but the responsibility for assistance remains in the same hands.
Some parts that have marked the pandemic
Two years of uninterrupted public information. Two years in which the voice of Fernando Simonheading the Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies of the Ministry of Health, became omnipresent.
Through their interventions, the pandemic took on its most analytical side. The asepsis of numbers slipped into everyday life also thanks to Salvador Illarelieved in January 2021 by Carolina Dariasat the head of the Ministry of Health.
The drop in the incidence rate and the positive evolution of the pandemic led earlier this month to Ministry of Healthwith prior agreement with the autonomous communities, to change the frequency of publication of both the vaccination report and the Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies. The first of them would be published once a week, while the second, which contains data on incidences, infections or deaths, would be issued twice a week.
The countdown began for some parts that have marked the progression of the pandemic. A pandemic whose impact, according to a survey by the Observatory of Trends, 85% of Spaniards continue to suffer psychologically, a figure that increases in the case of women (89%) and young people (94%).
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