COVID-19: Waves of the virus 'don't matter much anymore'

BET À DAY

If Quebec's national director of public health, Dr. Luc Boileau, announced Thursday morning that Quebec had entered the seventh wave of COVID-19, this notion would “no longer have much importance,” according to Dr. Karl Weiss, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. 

“I think we have to stop talking about vague . […] The waves, for a pandemic virus, it no longer matters much, ”he explained from the outset in an interview Thursday at QUB radio.

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“It's going to be like the flu, it's going to be like colds, we're going to have continual successions of cases that will happen at some point,” said the expert.

According to him, it is normal to see an increase in cases since contact between people is “more intense and much more numerous”, but the impact on the health system is no longer as significant as at the start of the pandemic. .

“The majority of patients hospitalized today with COVID are not hospitalized for COVID, that is to say they are hospitalized, but they have other things,” said Dr. Weiss.

He also sides with Public Health, which has chosen not to put in place health measures, including the obligation to wear a mask.

“I don't think we should go back to extremely drastic measures as we have done in the past,” he said.

The specialist also believes that the duration of isolation after catching the virus, i.e. 10 days, will surely have to be reviewed in the coming years.

Regarding the new booster dose for the vaccine, the situation is not urgent not, according to him.

< p>“There is no rush to get a dose of vaccine now, the “booster” doses are mainly aimed at a population that is at risk,” he suggested.