The infectologist and epidemiologist physician Luana Araújo said, this Tuesday (4), in an interview with CNN, that the burden on the health system should intensify by the advance of the Ômicron variant of the coronavirus.
Ômicron is more contagious and can cause more serious illnesses for the unvaccinated and weaken the health care system, experts say. As of the third week of December, the variant accounted for 73.2% of new coronavirus cases in the United States.
“[A variante Ômicron] has already arrived. In practice, we are seeing this happen with an absurd increase in the number of cases and a positivity in the private system, which is the one who is managing to test this with a little more accuracy within its capacity,” explained Luana.
“Some places are already overloading their hospitals with cases. It has an overload of the system as a whole. As we don’t have public testing, people go to emergencies to test. I flood emergencies across the country with influenza and Covid cases just so people can get tested. This burden should intensify, but we need to make progress in vaccination”, he continued.
In Luana’s opinion, the public consultation of the Ministry of Health to assess the vaccination of children between 5 and 11 years old should be disregarded, as it represents a political bias. The majority of voters were against the medical prescription for age group immunization.
“Honestly, I completely disregard the result of this public consultation, because it was done in a way that was completely skewed and disconnected from reality. People voted without knowing what they were voting for, who got to vote. A lot of people couldn’t do that.”
“This is a technical decision that does not fit in a public consultation. It was a technical decision taken by Anvisa [Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária], which is the responsible agency for this. And once approved, it should be offered as a right to health that our population has, and this is in law.”
Reference: CNN Brasil
