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Madrid, March 28 (EFE) .- Spain stops counting all coronavirus positives this Monday to focus only on serious cases and vulnerable environments, a new stage in which the isolation of people with mild symptoms or without them, widespread testing and tracing.
The new “Surveillance and control strategy against covid after the acute phase of the pandemic” that the Public Health Commission approved last Tuesday represents a further step towards the normalization of covid that implies “accepting a certain level of transmission” among the vaccinated, young and healthy population to focus only on the most fragile people.
In a context of high vaccination coverage -more than 92% of those over 12 years of age with a complete schedule- and high immunity acquired after the sixth wave, the Ministry of Health and the communities have considered that it was time to generate another type of surveillance that, without the exhaustive detection of the last two years, allows us to observe changes that require additional measures “without saturating the health system”.
In this way, and after verifying the reduction in the severity of the disease for the vast majority of those infected after the last wave, they have focused this new phase on vulnerable areas – health care, social and day care centers that provide social and health care, prisons and other places with institutionalized people- and vulnerable groups -over 60, immunosuppressed and pregnant women-.
Only cases and outbreaks that occur in these people and settings will be counted; It will be in the data for next Thursday when this new way of monitoring the covid is reflected, since those published tomorrow by the Ministry of Health will be the consolidated data corresponding to last week, sources from this department transfer to Efe.
And only they are going to undergo diagnostic tests from today, which also disappear before hospital admissions, although, in any case, the health professional may indicate the performance of a test under clinical criteria.
All confirmed cases with mild symptoms will no longer have to be isolated, but “extreme precautions and reduce social interactions as much as possible, constantly using the mask and maintaining adequate hand hygiene during the 10 days after the onset of symptoms”, avoid contact with vulnerable people, attend large events and, “whenever possible”, telework.
This is not the case for employees from vulnerable environments or those who attend these groups, who will not go to work in the first 5 days from the onset of symptoms or from the date of diagnosis if they do not have them; on the fifth day, and if they have disappeared, an antigen test will be done which, if positive, will be repeated every 24 hours until negative.
Likewise, those hospitalized must be isolated during admission until they obtain a negative test or a positive PCR compatible with low viral loads, although professionals may adapt these recommendations after evaluating each situation.
Only close contacts of these vulnerable groups and settings will be identified, and they will be instructed to perform a test at 3-5 days of follow-up; As was established at the beginning of March, they will not quarantine, although they must take extreme precautions for 10 days and minimize interactions.
All this also implies that, as is the case with the flu, sick leave will not occur following an epidemiological criterion as in these two years, but rather under clinical criteria.
This new situation will continue until the new sentinel surveillance system for acute respiratory infections is implemented before the first quarter of 2023.
As long as, the strategy makes clear, all the indicators of the use of care services are at low risk at the national level and in more than half of the autonomous communities and cities and that they show “a downward trend for at least two weeks” in the autonomies necessary to cover at least 80% of the population.
Spain’s entry into a new era of the pandemic coincides with the arrival of the first 11,900 treatments of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral intended for patients with mild symptoms but who may develop severe covid, of which Spain has purchased 344,000 doses for this year .
This is the second treatment available against covid in Spain: in February the first doses of Evusheld from AstraZeneca arrived, which acts as an express prophylaxis in immunosuppressed people who, despite being vaccinated against covid, do not generate antibodies to achieve an adequate defense against coronavirus.
(c) EFE Agency