THE Spain today abolished the quarantine obligation for light cases of Covid-19 and will no longer monitor only those who are seriously ill and vulnerable, as part of a new strategy aimed at treating the disease as endemic.
The country, which was among those with the highest death toll in Europe during the first wave of the pandemic and imposed one of the world’s deadliest lockdowns in the spring of 2020, justified the shift by citing very high population immunity and low incidence of the disease currently being recorded.
As the government had already announced in January, its will is to treated Covid-19 no longer as a pandemic, but as an endemic disease, the epidemiological follow-up of which will resemble that of the flu.
According to the Ministry of Health, this “different strategy” will focus its efforts on “high-risk individuals and environments”, which “means accepting a certain level of transmission” of Covid “within vaccinated and young populations”.
In addition to the lifting of the isolation requirement for asymptomatic and mild cases as well as for case contacts, the government also puts an end to systematic tests for all suspected cases and case contacts and restricts them to vulnerable persons (over 60 years, immunocompromised or pregnant women), to nursing and medical staff and to serious cases.
The Covid slight cases should however be “prudent” while maintaining the use of the maskwhich is still mandatory indoors in Spain, and restricting their contacts with particularly vulnerable persons.
Since mid-March, the government has stopped publishing the number of cases and deaths on a daily basis and no longer announces these figures except twice a week. Restricting tests to vulnerable people is expected to fundamentally change the record of cases.
Spain has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 92.4% of those over 12 being fully vaccinated.
As elsewhere, the country suffered in December and January the wave triggered by the Omicron variant, recording up to nearly 180,000 cases a day, a condition that boosted the body’s natural immunity.
The death toll and hospitalization, on the other hand, remained much lower than in previous waves in the country, which has recorded 102,392 deaths from Covid-19.
The incidence of the disease, which has been rising again in recent weeks, was 461 cases per 100,000 people in the last 14 days on Friday, up from a record 3,397 cases on January 17.
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