Epidemiologist: “It is too dangerous for variants to be in an inn and we have a Chilean covid super”
Catterina Ferreccio, Covid Advisory Committee Member and ACCDIS Researcher, was in favour of repeating - as a precaution- the system of celebrations “At home” that was applied during the National Holidays of 2020.
With community transmission of the Delta mutation, advirtió en Cooperativa el riesgo cierto de un cruce e intercambio de información genética entre ésta y la que en algún momento se denominó “cepa brasileña”, if bulk events are authorized.
La epidemióloga Catterina Ferreccio, member of the Covid Advisory Committee, manifestó en cooperative que está en contra de la realización de eventos masivos para Fiestas Patrias, due to the possibility of generating a new strain of the virus, to mix the Brazilian variants (Q1) and Delta.
In conversation with The Cooperative Journal, Ferreccio comentó que “ya teniendo al menos cuatro casos que no se sabe como se infectaron con la Delta, that's called community transmission, because we don't know, they did not come from travel and had no contact with travelers, eso es realmente peligroso”.
“Por lo tanto pienso que we have to go back a little bit, for now be as aggressive as possible with these cases, ver si la vacuna la podemos usar para controlar el brote”, Added.
For the expert, aunque “no lo hemos discutido como Consejo, I think we're going to be looking at what happens with the Delta and we're probably going to recommend something like that., stay at home, porque yo personalmente I think it is too dangerous to allow these variants to be found in an inn, intercambien información genética y nos encontremos con un super Covid chileno”.
Ferreccio explicó que se trata de las variantes “Q1, which is the Brazilian, que es la que llegó a Chile y nos produjo ese tremendo brote del que estamos saliendo, that if you remember we have had much more cases than the previous outbreak, even if they are vaccinated, i.e. it's really infectious., well transmissible, but it was not shown to produce higher mortality, sí que era más afín a los más jóvenes”.
“However, la Delta es muchísimo más transmisible y se considera que puede ser uno de los virus más transmisibles que la humanidad conozca y por lo tanto todo lo que hemos hecho para mantenernos sin contagio, habría que duplicarlo y eso es súper difícil”, Pointed out.
Booster dose
La académica apuntó que “la verdadera inmunidad de rebaño es con toda la población vacunada”, de modo que es necesario seguir ampliando el proceso y “bajar hasta los tres años de edad”.
In that line, indicó que el Consejo ha recomendado al Minsal “que la vacuna que llegue a Chile se gaste totalmente: o vacunamos a los rezagados o ponemos la tercera dosis o bajamos en edad”, towards younger children. The provision of third doses or, more exactly, “dosis de refuerzo”, can be with any vaccine; it is not essential that the same formula of the first two doses be applied to a person, and should start with those who were inoculated first, since the end of last year: health personnel and older adults, said the expert.
Read full interview at cooperativa.cl