The Minister of Health made an extremely important last-minute announcement for millions of Romanians across the country today, one that everyone should know about at the moment, and this is because he explains why there is still a coronavirus pandemic, but it won't end soon.
The Minister of Health also explains what is the difference between a pandemic and a major public health emergency, and the Coronavirus is still causing such big problems all over the world at the moment that there are currently no sufficient reasons for the pandemic to end, unfortunately.
"From the experts' point of view, the pandemic still represents a major public health emergency, and you cannot categorize it otherwise for a very simple reason, when every day you have hundreds of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of cases resulting in thousands of deaths, from the experts' point of view, it still remains a public health problem.
Of course we are in a favorable situation at the moment because we register every week probably somewhere between 10.000 - 12.000 cases per week. The number of deaths has decreased significantly, there are several deaths registered daily, that is, it is not a picture, if you want, at this moment, at least, more worrying than the one recorded annually during the flu season.
Unlike the flu, for which the etiological diagnosis is less precise, that is, not that an as precise diagnosis cannot be made, but a diagnosis is not made as systematically as in the case of COVID. Most of the time, and this happens everywhere, the number of flu cases is extrapolated according to the total number of viruses and certain studies that test in a certain sentinel in certain areas.
There is a definition, we work with definitions, the definitions related to public health emergencies, pandemics do not change, they are the same. If you have a large number, a community transmission, and it exists in several countries, on more than one continent, or two, then we are talking about a pandemic.
We have a pandemic, if you want, of other diseases, but not all of them are declared public health emergencies. The pandemic does not necessarily mean a public health emergency. We have this association between the pandemic, i.e. a disease that can be transmitted from community to several continents, but which poses problems for public health systems, because of this COVID pandemic is declared a major public health emergency."
