President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) said this Thursday (3) that the Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, is considering downgrading the status of Covid-19 in Brazil to endemic. The information was published by the president on social media.
– Due to the improvement in the epidemiological scenario and in accordance with § 2 of Art. 1 of Law 13.979/2020, the @minsaude , @mqueiroga2 studies to downgrade the current situation of COVID-19 in Brazil to ENDEMIA. pic.twitter.com/SUJraTuehQ
— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) March 3, 2022
Different technical names are adopted to define the epidemiological situation of a disease: outbreak, epidemic, endemic and pandemic.
The nomenclatures are associated with the scope of a disease and the impacts on populations.
Epidemics are defined by the increase in the number of cases of a disease in different regions, without reaching a global scale.
“Epidemic is when a disease presents an abrupt growth, beyond what is expected”, he says. “We don’t call it an epidemic when they are seasonal diseases, such as dengue, in which cases increase every year at the same time”, explains Carlos Magno, professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Unesp (Universidade Estadual Paulista).
A disease becomes a pandemic when it reaches worldwide levels. Considering the spread of a causative agent in several countries or continents, affecting a large number of people. The pandemic declaration is made by the World Health Organization (WHO), which classified Covid-19 in this way on March 11, 2020.
The concept of endemics, in turn, considers the presence of a disease recurrently in a region, but without showing significant increases in the number of cases. “When an epidemic happens constantly over time in the same place, it is called an endemic disease”, says Magno.
Outbreaks, on the other hand, are characterized by the sudden increase of a disease in a specific location, as an example, we have the Ebola outbreaks that reach restricted localities in African countries.
Source: CNN Brasil
