By Cristian Carlos. Special for Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]
The COVID-19 pandemic that began in the central city of Wuhan, China in 2019, has been caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 with its different variants – such as Delta and Omicron.
The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 6.23 million people worldwide and to have been suffered by 512 million people.
For this reason, representatives of the health care community were summoned by Ethnic Media Services to offer a briefing on the latest developments regarding vaccines against the new coronavirus that has caused positive cases of COVID-19 disease in recent weeks and the measures that the civilian population must take to overcome the pandemic and even end health measures.
Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, co-founder and board member of the Global Health Network and head of the COVID task force at the New England Institute for Complex Systems, is hesitant to conclude that America’s high vaccination rate will “win” against an emerging disease, since the CDC has just reported moderate numbers of deaths in other countries with higher vaccination rates.
Feigl-Ding has repeatedly expressed concern on Twitter about the handling of the pandemic in Mexico, which has seen its numbers reduced to just 12 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours.
He said that the exercise of “mitigation is key” to help health institutions and avoid an escalation of COVID-19 cases. “It is very early,” he insisted.
"We have to act quickly with the new variants," he said, mentioning that "vaccines need to be updated" to "offer them just as quickly."
"It's too early to know if children will have symptoms of long-term COVID-19," he said, noting that there is still no data on the new variants. He left open the possibility that some variants may have left U.S. territory.
For his part, Dr. Ben Neuman, professor of biology and chief virologist at the Texas A&M University Global Health Research Complex, has said that the new variants have come from cases of COVID-19 in unvaccinated patients, which "caused the evolution of the virus," he said.
He also indicated that the ideal would have been to contain the disease in a localized area with a strict biosecurity protocol, which, although it has been practiced, has not been possible to contain it to a geographic area. In this sense, he declared the longest-lived variants of SARS-CoV-2 known to be "extinct."
"I don't think that, in this case, the coronavirus will be ahead of it," he clarified, saying that there are other "more urgent variants" such as Omicron.
Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine in the Department of Health Policy and professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said that "the CDC's job needs to be made easier" in order to, in that order, discard health measures and, therefore, return to normal.
He said he still considers the use of face masks in places such as public transport, but made it clear that it is an obligation for people who are highly vulnerable to diseases.
He added, without naming any specific vaccines, that pharmaceutical companies are planning to have the COVID-19 vaccine also administer a dose of the influenza vaccine.
Like his colleagues, Schaffner insisted that the vaccine is effective in reducing hospitalizations and severe cases of COVID-19.
Dr. Manisha Newaskar, a pediatric pulmonologist at Stanford Children's Health, expressed concern for American children and lamented the low vaccination rates among them. "They are vulnerable," she said.
For this reason, Newaskar said that vaccination of minors should continue, and even redouble precautions such as the use of face masks in public places.
Newaskar stressed that "vaccines have served to prevent deaths" and emphasized that, in this, "they are effective" even when they are "updated," referring to what was said by Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding.
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