At this point in the pandemic, where many guards are no longer even swabbing those with symptoms, an inevitable question is triggered: Can we already think of Covid-19 as just another flu?

Roberto Debbag, infectious disease physician and president of the Latin American Pediatric Infectious Diseases Association, said: “Today we cannot understand covid as just another flu because it is a virus that continues to produce latent disease. In other words, 10% to 20% of patients have prolonged covid with symptoms for more than three months. Also, the flu does not produce neurological or cognitive changes like SARS-CoV-2 can.

Another issue, according to Debbag, is the emergence of new omicron —BA variants, despite the fact that vaccines reduce the death rate and complications of the disease. 4 and BA. 5-, it allows them to grow again.

Clinician Luis Cámera agrees that it is impossible to equate covid with flu today, mainly because coronavirus doubles the death rate of flu, even with high vaccination rates and less virulent variants.

“Covid is not like the flu. Today, with vaccination and its highly contagious variants, but also because it is less lethal, it has a mortality rate of between two and three per thousand, which is double the death toll from the flu, although much better than it was two years ago. , also the disease is slightly more lethal than the flu and is therefore not a homologous flu. “What we can say is that it gives the feeling that the virus is already at an endemic stage,” he said.

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covid invisibility

Changes in swapping requirements, confusion with other respiratory viruses, and mildness of symptoms have resulted in what experts call “underreporting of infections”; This means that there are more patients than detected.

“There is data showing that in 2020 the total number of positive tests should be multiplied by three to know the truth. The number of cases documented today should be multiplied by 15 or 20. This is what is said about the invisibility of the disease,” he said.

“There are many more positive cases than have been studied because today only older adults with symptoms are swabbed, those who are approached or hospitalized because they are too symptomatic, or those who have complications,” said infectious disease doctor Ricardo Teijeiro.

For Teijeiro, this massive contagion of the virus still means a risk for people who have some susceptibility due to age, pre-existing disease, immune compromise, or who are not vaccinated, and therefore should not be considered flu.