Just two weeks ago, the virologist Margarita del Val sounded the alarm when she warned of the “serious wave” of coronavirus cases that Spain is suffering. This Tuesday, as ABC advanced, the report on the epidemiological situation of the Center for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies revealed that a new variant of the coronavirus has been detected in our country. BA.2.12.1 is already behind twenty percent of infections in the United States and has forced the New York authorities to raise the alarm level for covid.
In Spain, the presence of the new strain, a sublineage of the silent omicron, is still residual, since it does not even reach two percent of the total number of positive cases of coronavirus sequenced.
However, the proliferation of new variants corroborates the forecast of experts such as Margarita del Val that the pandemic “is not over.”
The warning from the virologist of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) connects with other voices from the medical community such as that of Dr. Pedro Cavadas, who warned at the time that coverage of coronavirus vaccines would take “several years” to arrive. to the entire world population, which would delay the eradication of the pandemic.
Pedro Cavadas was one of the first doctors to warn of the serious risks posed by the coronavirus. He then predicted the pernicious effects that the inequality of an asymmetric distribution of vaccines would cause. And later he ruled that the mask to prevent covid should remain at least mandatory until the fall of this year.
However, the health authorities have chosen to eliminate the bulk of the restrictions while drastically reducing the number of tests to detect coronavirus infections. A circumstance that, in the opinion of Margarita del Val, means that “we do not know the real number” of positives.
The virologist recalled that “the total number of deaths from this latest wave is very high, more than 16,000 throughout the country,” which in her opinion constitutes a “very serious” situation. Thus, regarding the relaxation of the population as a whole regarding the situation of the coronavirus, she maintained that “we have the impression that it is more likely that we will be touched slightly by the vaccine, but we are not facing a finished pandemic at all.”
Although in Spain the situation of covid has stabilized with a cumulative incidence of around eight hundred infected per 100,000 inhabitants in the group of people over sixty years of age, in the United States an increase in cases of coronavirus has been detected, driven by BA.2.12.1, a new variant up to twenty-seven percent more contagious that is already circulating in our country.
In China or North Korea, the proliferation of coronavirus infections has resulted in the confinement of millions of people. A situation that confirms the predictions of Pedro Cavadas regarding what could happen with the pandemic, especially in countries where vaccines have not protected their inhabitants against covid.
This evolution reaffirms the warning from tycoon Bill Gates that the pandemic is not over and the need to invest to create work groups that avoid a new situation like the one that has decimated the world population with covid. The founder of Microsoft has also warned in his latest public statements that “there will be another pandemic and it will be a different pathogen next time.”
What Margarita del Val, Pedro Cavadas and Bill Gates agree on is their common message in favor of coronavirus vaccines as an effective formula to stop the pandemic and avoid its serious consequences.
