The state of public health emergency of international interest for Covid-19 “must be removed, because the data relating to the epidemiological trend of the SarsCoV2 pandemic tell us that by now this virus has become largely similar to other respiratory viruses, for example flu or others, and there is no longer an emergency.” This was underlined to ANSA by Matteo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Diseases clinic at the San Martino polyclinic hospital in Genoa and president of the Italian Society of Anti-Infectious Therapy (Sita).
“Continuing to consider Covid an international health emergency would mean – notes the expert – creating an imbalance in treatment compared to other infections due to other agents and comparable to the current SarsCoV2 infection.
I therefore believe that the World Health Organization can do nothing but decree the end of the emergency, if it wants to be credible”. The point, explains the infectious disease specialist, is that the virus today “is profoundly different from the beginning, and now we are able and have the tools to be able to live with it without maintaining an international state of emergency.
In fact, it is currently possible to live with the SarsCoV2 virus more than with various other viruses, because we have available drugs and vaccines that we can use that we do not have compared to other infectious diseases”.
In short, concludes Bassetti, “now the SarsCoV2 virus has become endemic, in the sense that it is widespread in a large part of the world, but has assumed characteristics for which we no longer witness an overload of health systems with emergency situations. In this sense – he concludes – I would no longer speak of a pandemic by giving this term an emergency meaning”.
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