Life before, during and after the arrival of omicron to Peru

We let our guard down. The incipient summer heat, the excitement of the end of the year holidays and the application of vaccines to 80% of the population distracted us, surely, from reality: the pandemic continues. With the third wave now official, there are many questions that assail us: can we really live with this virus? Will it be our third wave, the last? How many more vaccines will we need?

We try to answer these questions by going to specialists, scientists who recommend that we do not forget that science is not static. SARS-CoV-2 shows us this in real time.

The multiplication of viruses

Convinced that the omicron variant is not lethal, Peruvian society – fed up with this pandemic, like all societies in the world – crowded shopping malls, streets and squares, taking advantage of Christmas and the New Year. At the close of this edition we are witnesses of the consequences and the multiplication of infections. Let us remember that the virus is not a living being and that, to spread, it needs a host to multiply. “The more people it infects, the more the virus multiplies, and the same virus can have many mutations when it infects a person with immunosuppression, that is, someone whose immune system does not respond adequately”, explains Dr. Carlos Medina, infectologist at the University Peruvian Cayetano Heredia, who adds that this virus has the characteristic of mutating to adapt to the environment.

Faced with this scenario, Dr. Ángela Uyén, Health Policy and Defense Advisor at Doctors Without Borders, explains that reducing transmissions is one way to reduce the possibility of having more mutations. “It is important that we remember that coronaviruses are not only in humans, but also in animals,” he says. How to avoid transmissions? In addition to the use of a mask, avoiding crowds and getting vaccinated, it is necessary for societies to protect immunosuppressed populations and – remembering that we are in a global crisis – bet on the vaccination of the poorest countries.

Public health lessons

Societies’ relationship with the notion of public health has always been, let’s say, complicated. Dr. Ángela Uyén recalls that, historically, there has been a friction between public health measures and individual freedoms. “This is seen not only in times of pandemic, but in other aspects, in the control of states over the quality of food, for example; or in the use of drugs. These frictions are exacerbated in a pandemic, but not only in Peru. There are societies where it is much worse. Eastern European countries, such as Romania or Bulgaria, have a very low percentage of vaccination against COVID because they have anti-vaccine groups even before the pandemic ”, he says.

Dr. Carlos Medina adds that our divorce from public health has to do with the fact that our society is reactive: it waits for the problem to arrive and looks for solutions when it arises, when the ideal is for a society to be preventive, and to anticipate the problem so that it does not happen or to know how to react if it appears. “In our country this happens in cases of dengue or huaicos, we are not preventive, but reactive. We act when evil is already present. The same thing happens in this third wave: we hope that it will present itself to activate the response teams ”, he adds.

Can we live with SARS-CoV-2?

Difficult but necessary question. We know that human beings have lived with various viruses throughout history, and that they have been able to cope with almost all of them, although at the cost of many lives. In that sense, Dr. Uyén believes that living with the virus remains to be seen. “There are more than 200 respiratory viruses that are transmitted in the community, four of them are coronaviruses, and ‘adding’ one more is not that simple. The hard thing with this virus is that, unlike others, it causes greater mortality in certain specific groups, such as those over 65 or people with comorbidities. Right now, saying that we are going to live with him means that we are going to accept this mortality, ”he says.

For her, this coexistence will depend on a political decision and, of course, will not affect all societies equally. For this reason, it considers it necessary to invest in tools that help us cope, to have a high response capacity, good genomic surveillance, a good amount of tests, available drugs, good antivirals, vaccines and ICU beds in our hospital centers.

Dr. Medina, for his part, believes that if this virus begins to develop in such a way that mortality, transmissibility and lethality decrease, It could become an endemic and we could live with it, just as we live with the coronaviruses that cause the common cold and very mild symptoms.

Vaccination

If the specialists consulted agree on something, it is that the COVID-19 vaccine is a miracle. The speed with which multiple vaccines were created is impressive, and as new variants emerge, research to contain the virus continues. But, before the application of a third dose of vaccination, the question jumps: how many more doses will we need?

Unfortunately, kind reader, there is no answer to that question. As Dr. Medina says, You have to understand that the virus has only been with us for two years, and we are not yet fully aware of it. Dr. Uyén, for her part, adds that we can wait for a vaccine such as influenza to appear soon, which we place every year before the variations that this presents.

“If we have to read or guess the future to know how many vaccines we are going to need, we can fall into unjustified fears,” says Dr. Uyén. Let’s remember that science is changeable and that, despite skepticism and anti-vaccine movements, it has shown us that, only by trusting in it and in its progress, can we get out of this.