Video | Is the coronavirus heading towards an endemic? What comes after the sixth wave

From practically the beginning of the pandemic, experts warned: it was possible that the virus would stay with us forever and we would have to learn to live with it.

Two years later, six waves in Spain, vaccines, medicines and a variant that triggered infections, and, therefore, the population with natural immunity, the authorities are already working on new models to respond to the virus.

“A pandemic disease that little by little is acquiring endemic characteristics,” said the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, when at the beginning of the year she spoke for the first time about anticipating new scenarios and assessing “a new covid surveillance system” .

Óscar Zurriaga, vice president of the Spanish Association of Epidemiology, does not believe that it is correct to speak of endemia to refer to a more manageable phase of the virus.

"With endemic we are talking about a disease that remains at stable levels in terms of its incidence," explains the epidemiologist, who explains that the problem is the level of incidence at which it is located.

“If we are talking about a high level, nothing would suit us.

If it generates fewer serious cases, we would be talking about something with less impact, but I think that at this time we cannot establish whether this is going to be the most likely scenario.”

Given the difficulty of making any type of prediction about a virus subscribed to script twists, experts prefer to speak of "probable scenarios" to prepare a response.

Dr. Sylvie Briand, director of epidemic and pandemic diseases at the WHO, exposed three of them a few days ago.

In the first, SARS-CoV-2 would become the fifth known endemic coronavirus;

in the second, it would resemble the flu;

and in a third scenario, a new variant of concern could arise that would lead us to a scenario like 2020.

In this video we analyze these scenarios and explain what the change in the covid surveillance model proposed by the Government consists of.