After three years, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is allowing for a more controlled life. The WHO has already assumed that this is the phase in which we are closest to the end of the “pandemic”. Epidemiologist Manuel Carmo Gomes says that the current context meets the conditions for this to be the case.
It was on January 30, 2020 that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, in Geneva, that the outbreak of the new coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) constituted a global threat, having triggered the State of Emergency for Public Health of Importance International. At the time, in addition to China, where the virus was officially identified at the end of 2019, there were 19 more countries with human-to-human transmission, such as Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States of America. In Portugal, the first cases were diagnosed on March 2nd and, from then on, neither we nor the rest of the world stopped living under the threat of the disease caused by the new virus, covid-19, which is still the case today.
However, after three years, it can be said that “we live in a relatively calm and controlled context, but not free from the virus”, comments to DN the epidemiologist Manuel Carmo Gomes, who has led the Faculty team since the beginning of the pandemic. of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, which has always modeled the evolution of the disease. Adding: “About what will happen, there are no absolute certainties, but what is expected to happen – given the characteristics of the Omicron subvariants that are circulating, especially in the West, where their evolution has been gradual and always in the trying to evade our antibodies and reinfecting us – is that there is a more marked seasonality of the virus.” In this sense, argues the epidemiologist, “from the moment that the scientific community begins to have some capacity to predict the behavior of the virus, and with some security, the State of Emergency is no longer justified worldwide, because this is a warning for unexpected situations, and without the means to cope”, which was what happened when enacted.
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