Where did the Covid go in Spain?

WHO could forget how strange our lives became on March 14, 2020, thanks to the new spike protein virus? We were told it came from the Wuhan wet market in China, and the constant news coverage sparked public fear.

With little warning, we were instructed to stay at home (Stay at home) and were only allowed out for ‘essential supplies’, animal care, or to empty our bins, all to wear a mask.

The national state of alarm ended on June 9, 2021. After that, regional governments could decide rules, such as that residents must stay within their own province or municipality and not gather in groups.
Despite the strict lockdown, Spain had 255 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, an unenviable rate in Europe.

Subsequently, we finally ‘de-escalated’ the Covid restrictions, returning to a full life with family, friends and parties in 2022.

Three years later, what have we learned (if anything) from our collective experience? And, with many people currently sick with coughs and fevers, has covid really gone, and if so, where?

What happened to the Kraken variant?

In January, when China abandoned its ‘covid zero’ policy and opened its borders, the world feared that new subvariants would emerge.

A highly publicized sub-variant is Kraken (ZBB.1.5). Derived from Omicron and related to the XBB strain, Kraken appeared last October. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been viewing it as a ‘variant concern’. According to a December study in Cell magazine, is excellent for evading immune defenses and vaccines. So where is it?

Although it is assumed that Kraken is already in 29 countries, and already accounts for 40% of the cases in Spain (of those that are tested and reported), who knows someone who has been diagnosed with this subvariant? Answers in a postcard.

Are the tests still working?

Despite everyone appearing to be ill with a fever, persistent cough, and weakness, reports of positive covid tests are anecdotally rare.

Are home antigen tests doing their job? This is debatable. The advice from the Federal Medicines Agency (FDA) is ‘if you think you are infected with Covid but the test is negative, retest in 48 hours. . . if you’re still negative, take another one in two days’.

A 2022 study showed that home antigen tests were only 60% accurate on the first day of a person’s symptomatic infection. For asymptomatic infections it was reduced to 12%. A second test improved the accuracy to 92% and 51% respectively. The need for ‘serial tests’ is not inspiring.

Lucy Hayes Logan from Lanjaron says: “I recently caught Covid from someone with a ‘big cold’. When they notified me, I took the test every day and it came back positive after two days. I had previously caught Covid in January 2022. The symptoms were different this time, with fever, dizziness, chills and body aches, so it could have been a different variant.”

She adds: “Perhaps there aren’t many positive results because people are tested once when they start to develop symptoms, rather than retesting during the estimated incubation period. It is an expensive and unpleasant process. So with a negative test, they chalk it up to a bad cold or flu and just treat the symptoms.”

What about the super flu?

Since almost no one claims to have covid, many people complain of a weary cough that lasts three weeks, or a feverish flu that sends them to bed for a week. Colds never used to last this long.

Arguably, the lack of mixing and the prevalence of masks during the pandemic have reduced our resistance to germs, our immune response.

Ivan Sanz Muñoz, from Spain’s National Influenza Center in Valladolid, said in an interview with Teknautas: ‘Covid-19 displaced all respiratory viruses, in general. Therefore, now everyone is sick, since the viruses are recovering their ecological niche.

“In addition, the flu virus mutates 10 times faster than the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.”

Recent articles from the United States suggest that during the pandemic people lied about their children having covid. That’s no surprise.

People who work in the gig economy, or are self-employed without sick pay, cannot afford to be sick. A possible Covid infection is easy to pass off as a bad cold; the lack of testing means that most people don’t even know what they have contracted. And then they spread it.

Where did Covid really come from?

This March, the US Congress passed a bill to declassify documents on the origins of Covid. They suggest that he comes from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The US contingent is now asking what research the Wuhan lab did before the covid outbreak and why some researchers were sick in 2019.

Like one olive press reader said when the pandemic began: “If there was a puddle next to the puppy, you might reasonably think the puppy did it.” Despite that, the WHO went to great lengths to reassure the world that Covid mutated from pangolins sold at the nearby Wuhan wet market.

Where do we go now?

According to Statista, Spain had 3.7 million Covid cases as of March 1, 2023; and 119,400 deaths. Despite that, some people still claim that covid never existed and that it was just a ‘flu’.

Although we are back to some sort of normality, the impact on Spain’s mental health (and people’s finances) is still being felt today. And there is a whole Covid generation: children born after March 2020 know nothing other than the Covid era.

During the pandemic, we’ve all seen division and even hatred within our communities: mask wars, conspiracy theories, and denunciations from neighbors who ventured outside. This division in society exists today. It’s not gone.

If we’ve learned anything, it’s perhaps that the truth can be twisted (as well as put up with fake news), and when it comes to the pandemic, it falls somewhere in the great space between official dialogue and conspiracies.

READ MORE