Coronavirus: Don't Panic?

The minister, speaking of hysteria, referred - probably - to the comments of, inter alia, dr. Paweł Grzesiowski, but also what former members of the Medical Council for COVID-19 at the prime minister say in the media, who resigned due to decision makers ignoring their recommendations. Although experts distribute the accents in different ways, they talk about the need to increase the scope of testing (from returning to common testing through routine testing primarily of patients in hospitals and closed facilities, to performing tests in selected health care facilities, which is to give better knowledge about the development of infections) and - to speed up decisions on the availability of the fourth dose for those under 80 years of age. About opening covid branches - this postulate does not appear.

However, the Ministry of Health is not going to rush anything. Neither, despite the recommendation of EMA and ECDC to release the fourth dose for people 60+ already, nor with changes in testing. Tests, as Adam Niedzielski said, are available in primary care offices ("millions of antigen tests") and in hospitals - the problem is that in the spring the payer withdrew funding for these tests. There are cases when the hospital suggests patients to perform a commercial test - although admission to the ward is not dependent (cannot be made dependent) on its result.

The Minister of Health is aware that the infections will increase in the near future - because in Poland a highly infectious sub-variant of Omikron BA.5 is spreading. According to ministerial forecasts, there may be around 7,000 during the holiday season. infections per day, but this will not translate into the number of hospitalizations. - Until we have a large escalation in the number of hospitalizations, we will not make any hysterical movements - he said. - For now, the situation does not deserve drastic moves. We also take into account what is happening in other countries. Portugal, for example, is already past its peak of disease. A lot of tests were performed there, there were few hospitalizations - said the minister. However, it is difficult to compare the perfectly vaccinated Portugal (almost 100% of vaccinated people over 60 years of age) with Poland, although the minister argues that Poland is characterized by a "high degree of immunization", and has antibodies over 90%. of us - a large part, however, has them only after infection, and the BA.5 variant bypasses such acquired immunity even after the earlier variants of Omikron were infected, not to mention the older variants of SARS-CoV-2.

There is also no rush to open vaccinations to younger seniors. On the one hand, there are signals that perhaps in July such a decision will be made, on the other - the Ministry of Health seems to be waiting for the approval of new vaccines - and only then, in the fall, probably not earlier than in October, to launch a vaccination campaign with the fourth dose.