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Christian Drosten (in January 2022): »We are experiencing the first endemic wave with Sars-CoV-2 this winter«
Photo:
Clemens Bilan / EPA-EFE
After this winter, the immunity of the population will be so broad and resilient that the virus will hardly be able to get through in the summer – the Corona expert Christian Drosten has now explained that.
"This winter we are experiencing the first endemic wave with Sars-CoV-2, in my opinion the pandemic is over," said the head of virology at the Berlin University Hospital Charité to the "Tagesspiegel".
The only limitation mentioned by virology was a possible further mutational leap – “but I don’t expect that anymore at the moment either”.
Drosten had already announced the all-clear in an interview with Die Zeit in November: the end of the pandemic was imminent, he said there.
Regarding the situation in China, where the corona virus is currently spreading rapidly again, Drosten said: “The big mistake in China was that the population, especially the older ones, had no awareness of vaccination.” In his opinion, the vaccination campaign been the decisive step in combating the pandemic in Germany and Europe.
He therefore also defends the measures to contain the virus: »It was never about stopping the pandemic, it was clear from the start that this was not possible.
But if nothing had been done, then in Germany in the waves up to Delta there would have been a million deaths or more.
So you had to reduce contacts.«
Intensive care physicians: Solid immunity
The intensive care physician Christian Karagiannidis assessed the corona situation in a similar way in an interview with the editorial network Germany (RND).
“I expect that the pandemic will now increasingly come to an end,” said the member of the federal government’s Corona Expert Council.
There will certainly be one or two small waves, but the immunity level of the population is solid and there are significantly fewer Covid patients in the intensive care units.
The assessment that Corona is now an endemic is shared by other experts such as Thomas Mertens, Chairman of the Standing Vaccination Commission (Stiko).
In his view, a pandemic is primarily defined by the fact that a globally unknown pathogen with which people have no immunological experience breaks into the population.
That is no longer the case, Mertens said at the end of October.
ipp/dpa
