The Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities are about to take a turn in the surveillance of the coronavirus after two years of the pandemic. The Interterritorial Health Council has approved this Thursday a plan whose main change is that each case will no longer be counted, but only the serious ones or those that occur in vulnerable people compared to the current approach of monitoring the entire infected population.
This new strategy, advanced by elDiario.es, is a kind of intermediate step before jumping to surveillance through sentinel networks, such as those used in the flu. Minister Carolina Darias announced it at the end of the meeting convened in Zaragoza, although she has not specified when it will come into force.
The transitory system will be “capable of detecting increases in the incidence in the general population, which allows the early detection of new variants and the measurement of vaccine effectiveness,” says the institutional declaration that resulted from the meeting between Health and the councilors.
In addition to individually monitoring only serious cases and in vulnerable settings, the strategy also includes monitoring outbreaks in more vulnerable settings or at risk of social exclusion and requires maintaining the information systems developed to monitor COVID-19 “before the risk of negative changes in the course of the pandemic and provide information on the cases detected in primary care included in the ARI codes”.
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