SRINAGAR – Doctors Association Kashmir (DAK) on Sunday said Covid-19 case counts have lost relevance as they don’t reflect the same as they used to.
“Covid case numbers cause unnecessary panic and fear among people,” said DAK President and Influenza expert Dr Nisar ul Hassan.
Dr Hassan said early in the pandemic daily case count was used as a metric because that time a rise in cases inevitably led to increase in hospitalization and death.
“But that has changed now,” he said adding with widespread immunity in the general population due to vaccination and natural immunity, most of the infections are mild and do not require hospitalization.
The DAK President said we have reached a point in the pandemic where we no longer need to identify and manage every single case of the virus.
“It is time for us to stop worrying about cases and shift our focus on hospitalization which is miniscule at this point in time,” he said.
“Relying on case numbers as the metric to decide mitigations will trap us forever.”
Dr Nisar said Covid-19 has entered into an endemic stage and the rise and fall in cases is going to be a routine process.
It has become yet another infection joining many other diseases that we have learned to live.
He said we need to deal Covid the way we do other endemic viruses such as the flu.
We are not publicly reporting daily case count of influenza, nor do we pivot what we are doing on a dime when cases reach some arbitrary number.
“We have to take a similar approach for Covid, track case counts internally and alert public only on hospitalization and death,” he added.
