The Uruguayan government announced on Monday that it will not modify its strategy to combat covid despite the increase in cases, and insisted on vaccination as a way to prevent the advance of the virus, in addition to emphasizing the importance of individual care.
With nuances, it is the same strategy that Israel has applied, which appeals to the vaccine on the understanding that restrictive measures will not be able to stop the incidence of the disease and will only punish the economy. Meanwhile, Spain goes a step further, under one premise: maintain care in the middle of the wave, but begin to project a stage in which the covid is treated as one more contagious disease.
Spain: the end of testing?
The Spanish government announced that plans to change strategy once the omicron wave passes, to start a stage where mass testing is abandoned and a similar approach is applied to the one applied each year in the fight against influenza: not to follow each contagion but to serious cases, and also to establish a series of “sentinel” centers , which serve as a sample to verify if there are increases in the incidence of the disease.
“Faced with this new reality, we are working on the transition from universal surveillance to a sentinel of mild acute respiratory infection in primary care and severe in hospitals. But it cannot be changed overnight. We have international commitments [de notificación de todos los casos] and the sentinel systems must be consolidated, ”” explained Amparo Larrauri, head of the surveillance group for influenza and other respiratory viruses at the National Epidemiology Center (CNE), to El País.
“Now, given the enormous transmissibility of covid, it is a very big challenge to strictly comply with universal surveillance protocols, it is becoming impossible,” explained Larrauri.
Uruguay made the same decision a couple of weeks ago, when it stopped testing asymptomatic people who have three doses and are close contacts. This Tuesday the WHO recalled that, in scenarios where testing is required, it recommends a priority system at the time of testing.
