Ômicron brings fear of collapse, but the system has not been pressured, says Queiroga

The Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, said this Wednesday (12) that the advance of the omicron variant of Covid-19 brings fear of a collapse in health care, but that the disease has not yet put pressure on these services.

“We already have news from other countries, where this variant has become prevalent, and that there are really large numbers of cases, but health systems have not been under such pressure, especially in those populations that are heavily vaccinated,” said the minister at an event for Health. about the variant.

The surge in Covid cases, however, has forced local governments to reopen beds. In the state of São Paulo, hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the ICU grew by 91% in eight days.

At another point in the debate, the secretary of Health Surveillance, Arnaldo Medeiros, stated that the ômicron is “certainly” the variant that most circulates in Brazil.

Earlier, President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) again played down the health crisis and suggested that the new strain is “welcome”.

“[A] ômicron, which has already spread all over the world, as the people who really understand say: that it has a very large capacity to spread, but very small lethality”, said Bolsonaro, in an interview with the website Gazeta Brasil.

“They even say it would be a vaccine virus. They should even… According to some studious and serious people – and not linked to pharmaceuticals – they say that the ômicron is welcome and can indeed signal the end of the pandemic”, Bolsonaro also declared.

The executive director of the WHO (World Health Organization) health emergencies program, Michael Ryan, reacted to Bolsonaro’s speech. Asked by the press about the Brazilian president’s statement, the organization’s representative said that “this is not the time to declare that this virus is welcome, no virus that kills people is welcome”.

Still at the Health event, Queiroga said that the new variant worries the population, but that the government works to avoid collapse and loss of life.

“It quickly spread around the world, bringing uncertainty, bringing fear in people of a new outbreak of cases, new impact on the health system, with the prospect of collapse, and loss of life. We are here working precisely to prevent that from happening” , said Queiroga.

The last few days in Brazil have been marked by high demand for testing and by several records of people infected by the variant – even vaccinated or who had Covid previously.

The hypothesis that the variant represents the decline of the pandemic is one of the scenarios evaluated by epidemiologists, but not the only one. They point out that the virus can still undergo many mutations, and it is not known whether they will make the disease more or less severe.

So far, the expansion of the omicron reigns over the other variants wherever it goes. Because of the new strain, the world has been registering numbers close to 2 million cases per day, a much higher amount than in previous waves of the disease.

Scientific entities demanded on Tuesday (11) a broader testing policy from the federal government and the permission of self-test. Demand for tests soared with the advance of contamination at the turn of the year.

In a note released this Wednesday, Abramed (Brazilian Association of Diagnostic Medicine) warned of the risk of lack of necessary inputs in Covid-19 exams. The entity recommended prioritization of exams to patients “according to a severity scale”.