2023-10-11 06:33:07
Nobody remembers regarding Covid anymore. Does this mean that, as predicted, it turned into a regular ARVI, and it no longer landed people in intensive care? Maybe the danger was exaggerated from the very beginning, and even lockdowns were unnecessary? Alexander Solovyov, a doctor and leading expert at the MedLabExpress laboratory association, told Pravmir that three years later we learned regarding Covid.
Alexander Soloviev
“The virus has not been canceled”
— WHO officially declared the end of the pandemic in May, but the rise began in August. How significant is this?
“Many people misinterpret what happened in May. The World Health Organization did not announce the end of the pandemic, but the lifting of the state of emergency associated with the pandemic. But at the same time, there were calls for governments to remember that the virus has not disappeared. It is changing and requires monitoring and application of the tools that have emerged during the pandemic to control the situation.
This is what the WHO said. This is the second part of the message. But everyone only remembered the first one, that the pandemic is everything.
However, lifting the emergency regime is not the same as lifting the virus. Nobody canceled it.
On the contrary, epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians still take the situation with the spread of coronavirus seriously, noting a number of points. First, it continues to evolve, and speculation that sooner or later more contagious or more pathogenic variants may emerge is not at all unfounded. Secondly, we have already accumulated quite a lot of information regarding what consequences the coronavirus infection has for those who encountered it, regardless of how the disease progressed.
Today it is reliably known that even people who have suffered from the disease asymptomatically then suffer for a long time from a variety of health problems. The proportion of these people is estimated differently, but on average it can be said that it ranges from 5 to 10 percent of all cases.
— What type of health problems?
“This is what is now described as long-Covid, when chronic, long-term reservoirs of the virus are formed in the body and the person does not fully recover. As a result, inflammatory processes are maintained in various organs and tissues. Long Covid has a disabling effect, which, according to the observations available to us today, lasts for two years. A whole pool of chronic patients with a variety of disorders of the nervous, cardiovascular, and endocrine systems is being formed. They are even difficult to classify.
Photo: pexels.com
We see an increasing number of cases of sudden death syndromes associated with microthrombosis, myocarditis, and we see an increase in the number of autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes. We are seeing an increase in neurological disorders among children and adults.
— And all these are the consequences of long-Covid, when a person was not seriously ill, but for a long time?
– Yes exactly. There were preliminary hypotheses on this matter, but now they are confirmed. Indeed, as a result of prolonged exposure to coronavirus infection, a significant proportion of people develop a complex and multifaceted chronic pathology. Therefore, the alarm that was expressed in winter and spring, especially with the advent of omicron, was not in vain.
Without measures to reduce the risk of infection, people will encounter new variants of the coronavirus several times a year, looking for holes in our immune defenses.
This is exactly what has been happening since the summer, when the epidemiological situation in the Northern Hemisphere once once more began to deteriorate. Since the end of July, another wave of coronavirus infection has begun, first hitting Japan, later other countries – the UK, USA, Canada, and now a third of the EU countries. Somewhere in the second half of August – early September, Russia also began to feel a deterioration in the epidemiological situation. The virus has made another evolutionary leap, variants with a large number of new mutations have appeared.
“It is incorrect to compare Covid with the flu”
— What are these new strains? Pirola?
“Pirola is one of the variants that has caused concern, and the World Health Organization listed it as requiring special attention at the end of the summer. But pyrol has not yet significantly affected the epidemiological situation, while it is just spreading, albeit very actively, throughout the world. So far, the deterioration has been associated with omicron variants. About each of them one can say approximately the same thing. This is the continuing evolution of the virus, each time it becomes more and more adapted to evade our immune defenses, and is more easily transmitted from person to person.
Eris is one of the variants that caused deterioration in the summer in a large number of countries, and now it is being replaced by new strains, with a new set of mutations, which is manifested in an increase in the burden on health systems in all countries of the Northern Hemisphere, in an increase in hospitalizations, in including in intensive care units. Moreover, this applies not only to older people, but also to children. They also end up in hospitals and also die. We have been observing an increase in morbidity and mortality in all countries of the Northern Hemisphere for at least a month and a half.
“The public consensus seems to be that Covid, as predicted, has turned into the flu. And the flu has new mutations every year, no one really cares regarding it.
— Comparing Covid with the flu is still incorrect and simply impossible. It has not turned into a simple seasonal disease; we can see this at least by the fact that the rise began in the summer. The point here is not the seasons, but the fact that previously acquired immunity weakens following 5-6 months and people once more become defenseless.
Photo: pexels.com
Various countries are now publishing mortality statistics for 2023, and you can see that tens of times more people have died from Covid in the last 9 months than from the flu. With the flu, people are not hospitalized in the thousands and do not end up in intensive care beds. After the flu, 5–10% of people are left with chronic problems. And it mutates much more slowly. And here, several times a year, variants appear that cause concern.
That is, all our expectations that it would turn into a moderately severe ARVI were not justified. The virus does not want to change the way we would like.
“Humanity has lost control of the virus”
— How can we even know who is sick with Covid if no one is being specifically tested?
“And now no country in the world can provide accurate data on the number of cases. More or less accurate models are available in those countries that monitor wastewater for virus content.
After all, it is released not only through breathing, but also with feces, enters the sewer system, and with established virological monitoring, all this can be tracked. In the United States, mathematical models now show that the infection rate is approximately the same as in the first two years of the pandemic. That is, no less than during the period when the first option circulated and when the delta appeared. And in the next few months, pyrol will be actively distributed, and other data will appear. American models show that another 10–12% of the population will be additionally infected, and this despite the fact that even now, in September-October, the level is quite high.
A woman in New York takes a coronavirus test in a mobile laboratory. Photo: Jeenah Moon/Archyde.com
And we see from reports from different countries that this is accompanied, as I already said, by an increase in hospitalization, hospitalization in intensive care beds, and an increase in mortality. We observe exactly the same thing according to the operational headquarters.
— Why do you think the topic has gone so far out of public attention?
“We’re probably used to the fact that people often get sick and nothing can be done regarding it.” No general measures, such as remote work and study, or wearing a mask, will help now and, in fact, they have been abandoned. Well, the population, accordingly, also no longer thinks regarding the need to somehow defend themselves.
In addition, in Russia there is no updated vaccine at the beginning of the autumn season, which means there are no calls to get vaccinated. Vaccination is the main reason for us to talk regarding Covid. That is, there is no information background that would update the topic of covid and safety.
— Why have lockdowns and remote work become ineffective? Has something changed in the perception of these measures – perhaps they were redundant from the very beginning?
— One of the latest publications by Chinese scientists answers your question. At the beginning of the pandemic, before highly contagious variants like Omicron were circulating, the entire set of measures that China followed until December last year were highly effective. They simply had to be followed, and in a consolidated manner, by the whole world. And then, while gaining time once morest the virus, it was necessary to achieve a high level of vaccination.
Beijing residents buy medicine. Photo: Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times
Unfortunately, most countries did not follow these recommendations, canceled them too early, did not provide vaccination, and so on. In addition, the vaccine was not available in many places – in particular on the African continent. Humanity lost control of the virus in its early stages.
And when such contagious variants as Omicron appeared, all restrictive measures became useless and even harmful. They were of no use, and they turned out to be destructive for society and the economy. It is impossible to adhere to such strict recommendations for years.
“We don’t have a new vaccine. And the old one too”
— You said that our vaccine is not updated. Do they do this in other countries?
“Unfortunately, very few countries have moved in this direction. The USA, Great Britain, and a number of European countries have updated vaccines, and the vaccination campaign has been actively going on since mid-September. At the same time, everyone’s approaches are different. The UK, for example, recommends vaccinating only people at risk, while the US has a more comprehensive strategy, recommending that everyone be vaccinated from six months of age.
In Russia, Academician Ginzburg already at the beginning of summer spoke regarding the problems associated with financing clinical trials of the updated vaccine. Only by the beginning of the autumn season were Sputnik studies with an updated composition approved and funded. Accordingly, it will appear in December at best.
— Will this composition take pyrola into account?
— No, by the time development began, there was no pyrola yet. You can’t get away with it here. However, this vaccine will be created taking into account the relatively fresh variants of Omicron that were circulating earlier this year. This is better than the composition, which goes back to the first, Wuhan version.
— Have there been any new drugs?
“Convasel, developed by the FMBA, has appeared; it is not a vector, but a peptide vaccine. It differs from all vaccines used in the world in that it uses not the surface protein with which the virus clings to the receptors of our cells, but the internal protein of the virus. But we do not know the clinical effectiveness of this vaccine.
— Does it still make sense to do booster vaccinations with the old vaccine?
— As far as I know, Sputnik is not available in many regions. The last remnants of the batch arrived in the spring, and this work was not funded further; the Ministry of Health did not place new applications. But would it be possible to use it and what would be the effect? Probably, our body would react by increasing the production of antibodies to the first Wuhan variant, but the strains currently circulating very easily bypass these antibodies. That is, the old boosters are essentially meaningless, and there are no new ones yet. It is already clear that we will have access to an updated vaccine with a delay; mass vaccination can only be expected from the beginning of next year.
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