Time to treat COVID like common flu, Spain’s leader tells EU

Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, has called on the European Union to start debating the possibility of treating the COVID virus as an endemic illness, like the flu.

Sanchez who disclosed this during a radio interview with Spain’s Cadena SER said the situation was not what was faced a year ago as Spanish schoolchildren returned to their classrooms after the holidays.

“I think we have to evaluate the evolution of Covid to an endemic illness, from the pandemic we have faced up until now,” he added.

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Sanchez said it was time to open the debate around a gradual reappraisal of the pandemic “at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level.”

Sanchez’s comments echo those made in the U.K. by politicians last year with Prime Minister Boris Johnson telling the British public that they would have to “learn to live with the virus.”

Many epidemiologists and virologists have stated that Covid — which first emerged in China in late 2019 before spreading around the world, causing more than 313 million cases to date, and over 5 million deaths — is here to stay and will become an endemic disease eventually.