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The World Health Organization is meeting to determine whether COVID-19 should be considered a global emergency.
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But while the emergency phase may soon be over, the pandemic is no longer so.
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Increased hospital admissions and new Omicron sub-variables are raising concern for Canada’s overburdened healthcare system.
COVID-19 may no longer be seen as a global emergency as it once was, but with severe infection Emerging new sub-variables Which has the potential to drive future waves at a time when the health care system is already overburdened – when will the pandemic end?
“Many of us desperately want this to end, but unfortunately it hasn’t,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, said in an interview with CBC News. .
“We’re still in the middle of this, to a point, but we’re nowhere near the end.”
Uncertainty about the end of the pandemic lies in the virus itself, which continues to mutate rapidly with over 300 Omicron sub-variants currently present. Followed by the World Health Organization All over the world, Van Kerkhove said.
“The virus is evolving and unpredictable,” she added. “We don’t know exactly what the characteristics of the next variable will be.”
New Omicron sub-variables derived from earlier strains such as BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 appear High levels of immune evasionunlike anything we’ve seen before in a pandemic, but what exactly that means in terms of real-world transmission remains unclear.
“We are in the second act of a three-act play,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview with CBC News.
“How can you declare that the epidemic is over when we don’t know what to do next?”
Europe has entered a new wave of COVIDWhile OntarioAnd the QuebecManitoba new bronze And the B.C.E. Already seeing a rise in hospital admissions – just as much pressure on the healthcare system as Re-emergence of seasonal diseases such as influenza Expected to hit hard.
“We have the tools now to end the coronavirus emergency in every country,” Van Kerkhove said. “The challenge of ending the epidemic is a different thing.”
COVID is not going anywhere
One thing is for sure, COVID is not going anywhere. The virus continues to spread around the world in one form or another and has even taken root in animal reservoirs such as white-tailed deer It is no longer possible to eliminate it completely.
But even though the epidemic may not end, the end of the emergency phase is still looming. The World Health Organization launched an ambitious plan earlier this year to Ending the COVID-19 emergency in every country in the world by the end of 2022 using available tools such as vaccines, antiviral drugs and therapies to further prevent severe disease and death.
The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a press conference Wednesday, before a committee meeting to determine whether Covid is still Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
But the pandemic is not over and there is a lot of work to be done.”
Tedros said ongoing global risks due to large gaps in vaccination, reduced surveillance, low testing and sequencing rates, and persistent “doubts” about the impact of variables will significantly influence the decision to declare a COVID emergency.
“What we are trying to tell countries about, and the way we can end the emergency is to be prepared, to be agile, and to use the tools — treatments, diagnostics, vaccines — very appropriately for the people most at risk in every single country,” Van Kerkhove said. .
“Vaccination plays an important role, but if you look at vaccination coverage, we have over 12.7 billion doses of vaccines being given globally, but 32 percent of the world’s population still gets one dose, so there is still this huge amount of vaccines out there. injustice.”
The health care system is overburdened
Experts have warned that the ongoing burden of the pandemic on the healthcare system will continue to be felt for years to come COVID long Affect a subset of sufferers, and Delayed cancer screening And the surgeries It caused a massive backlog at a time when COVID levels are expected to rise again.
Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston at Harvard, said in an email to CBC News.
“As a result, things have stretched quite a bit in many places. Put COVID on top of that (not to mention the flu) and we can expect there will be challenges.”
Watch | Quebec urges reinforcement as COVID-19 levels rise:
Quebec’s health minister has urged residents to get booster doses as COVID-19 cases slowly begin to rise.
Raywat Deonandan, a global health epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, said that while COVID has become endemic in many parts of the world, weakened immunity, new variables and deregulation can change that.
“Unlike previous waves, where one variable dominated the others, it now appears that a soup of variables is going to bother us,” he said.
“This will continue as long as we allow submissions to take place. All of our policy options seem to indicate that we intend to allow free submissions.”
Dionandan said that ending the emergency phase of the pandemic is a “political definition” related to the allocation of resources to COVID and the level of death and severe illness that the community is willing to tolerate.
“We are currently at about 40 deaths per day (nationally), and models indicate that this will not change significantly as this new wave develops,” he said, adding that this stabilization in the level of COVID-related deaths could be considered as an “emergency decline.” “.
“The other consideration, of course, is hospital staff, which is definitely in an emergency situation. And I don’t see that getting any better anytime soon, without some serious and innovative government intervention.”
The virus will continue to mutate
Given that the virus continues to throw an evolutionary curve at us, with new variants emerging that have the potential to evade immunity and drive global transmission, what exactly will it take to end the COVID emergency – and the pandemic altogether?
“We must have a vaccine or immunity to infection that is relatively protective against new variants and that protection will be a permanent thing,” Osterholm said.
“Right now, even if you take a look at what an annual immunization approach would be, we’re seeing immune waning happening long before that.”
Pfizer said in a Release Updated bivalent COVID-19 vaccine this week Accredited in Canadawhich targets the original strain and the dominant sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5, showed a ‘significant increase’ in neutralizing antibody response after 30 days.
New Comment: “It seems safe to predict that updated vaccines will perform better than other vaccines of the same old” Published in the journal Nature points out, although the data is so far limited.
And the New search from Qatar Released as a dissertation in the New England Journal of Medicine prior to peer review, previous Omicron infections were found to provide strong protection against future infections from BA.1 and BA.2 – but to a lesser extent than BA.4 and BA.5.
Meanwhile, a new study in Quebec on hybrid immunity published in JAMA this week suggested that two or three doses of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in people with previous infection provide strong protection against hospitalization from Omicron.
Hanage said we can expect to see a continuous mutation of the virus in the future with selection pressure in favor of variants “that are better able to infect people with some immunity” from vaccination and previous infections.
“What this means is that the virus will continue to exist and will infect many of us,” he said.
“We don’t expect the consequences of that infection to be as bad as what we’ve seen in the past few years because of the immunity we’ve built up, but it won’t be trivial. Older people especially should get boosters.”
“Vaccines will be part of our future.”
One thing that would be a “significant added benefit”, Van Kerkhove said, would be the development of a nasal vaccine that could better reduce infection and transmission while still preventing severe illness and death.
“It would be a game-changer, because that would address the challenge that we have about this intense circulation of this virus and the evolution of this virus that continues,” she said, adding that the vaccines we have in place are still working against severe disease and death. “But we don’t have that yet.”
A new nasal version of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has suffered from A big setback This week after human clinical trials it didn’t produce the immune protection the researchers had hoped for, and was actually weaker than the shot, but there is others in development.
“We need to educate the public more about the fact that because this virus is going to be with us, vaccines are going to be part of our future. It’s not the only solution, but vaccines and the need for additional doses, is something we are,” Van Kerkhove said:
“How often does that happen? We don’t know yet.”
The virus will eventually stay with us, she said, not in the same way as the flu because it’s a completely different virus that keeps evolving to evade immunity, and we still don’t have any “predictability” with it.
“We have to live with COVID responsibly,” she said. “I really have an aversion to the phrase ‘living with COVID’ because many have used it as a sense of letting go – but we don’t need to. We have tools that are in there now.”
Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
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