Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez calls for debate on treating COVID-19 as endemic

Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez also announced that Spain is purchasing this month 344,000 pills of a COVID-19 antiviral drug developed by the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

Associated Press

January 12, 2022 / 12:36 IST

The change would mean treating COVID-19 as an endemic illness rather than a pandemic, Spain's PM Pedro Sanchez said. (File image: Reuters)

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says that amid falling lethality rates for COVID-19, Spain wants European officials to consider whether to move away from the detailed tracking that the pandemic has required until now to a flu-like monitoring system.

The change would mean treating COVID-19 as an endemic illness rather than a pandemic, Sanchez said on January 10, adding that deaths as a proportion of recorded cases have fallen dramatically since the initial onset of the pandemic.

"I believe that we have the conditions for, with precaution, slowly, opening the debate at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level, to start evaluating the evolution of this disease with different parameters than we have until now," Sanchez told Cadena SER radio.

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The prime minister confirmed a report from the country's leading newspaper, El Pas, that under a new monitoring system already being drafted by Spanish health authorities every new infection would not need to be recorded and that people with symptoms would not necessarily be tested but they will continue to receive treatment.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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