Opinion – Atila Iamarino: The Covid carousel enters another wave

Our immune honeymoon has passed once more. New variants have already been found in Brazil and Fiocruz’s InfoGripe bulletin has already detected a rise in hospitalizations due to respiratory syndrome in the states.

None of this is unexpected. In September, commented: “Everything indicates that we are entering another Covid low with recent immunity holding the virus back. If the pandemic behavior continues, we should see another wave from November/December. Alpha, delta, gamma and omicron variants have been detected this time of year.”

We are not going through what Amazonas went through at the end of 2020 with the emergence of a more transmissible variant. We are seeing more descendants of the omicron variant that continue to accumulate immune escape mutations and take advantage of the fact that the time since the last wave has been enough for herd immunity to fall.

A wave like the one the world is experiencing now is the step by step of Covid becoming an endemic, with predictable cycles. The two annual waves, one in summer and one in winter, have been consolidating over the past two years. And European countries that are already riding this wave have seen fewer hospitalizations than previous waves. Which is not to say that the situation is peaceful. The current wave can still compromise hospital beds. And, as we’ve recently discovered, having Covid more than once can greatly increase your risks of hospitalization, death, and multiple sequelae.

It also doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to do. For dengue, we have annual campaigns. For the flu, we have the seasonal vaccination before winter. For Covid, we already have a consensus of more than 400 scientists from around the world who recommend measures for managers and the general public, such as communication and prevention. These are not radical measures. Resuming the use of masks indoors, especially in a summer when the windows are closed and the air conditioning is on, is a measure that has a great impact on the transmission of the virus without much impact on our daily lives. As Boston schools that have maintained mask-wearing show.

Reinforcing the campaign by the booster dose is also essential to keep the immune barrier as strong as possible. However, we went through the opposite, with vaccines lacking especially for children and without a campaign. Anvisa and the technical committee that the Ministry of Health unnecessarily invoked unanimously approved the RNA vaccine for children aged 6 months to 5 years. But the Minister of Health prefers to listen to vaccine denialists with a speech that contributes to having the worst vaccination rates in recent decades.

Contrary to the technicians themselves, the Ministry of Health only intends to vaccinate children with comorbidities. While the minister brags about doing the bare minimum, which is promoting vaccination against poliomyelitis, between January and October of this year, we lost 457 children under 5 years of age to Covid in Brazil.

The most accepted measures among specialists to reduce the impact of this and the next wave are collective ones, which depend on the government and our cooperation. But here in Brazil, the trend that repeats itself is that of each one for himself. Wave after wave, we see cases increasing in the northern hemisphere and the federal government does not mobilize to prevent the preventable from happening.

As much as these are waves, it seems to me more that we are on a Covid merry-go-round, where we constantly return to the same position and go through the same problems. I cannot accuse the current health management of something: inconsistency. She has been consistently silent, pro-contagion, and pro-Covid.