He Ministry of Health prepares a plan with masks against respiratory infections in health centers and hospitals. Health is working with the autonomous communities on a document that will be presented to the Public Health Commission on October 17 with recommendations on action criteria against influenza and Covid-19. The actions to be taken have not yet been defined. But Health Minister Mónica García indirectly acknowledged that masks will be mandatory in health centers when transmission of respiratory viruses begins to increase: “The tools and measures we have against respiratory viruses are vaccination, hygiene, masks and containment measures, there is not much more,” García emphasized when asked during the press conference after the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System (CISNS) about the possible return of masks in health centers and hospitals.
“This is a technical document which is being developed in the various commissions and presentations, but we wanted to unify both the technical criteria and the political criteria, as the advisors themselves have often asked us to do. same.», explained the minister.
García assured that this text was being developed with the CCAA to anticipate and prevent these situations and that “it is not necessarily the Ministry of Health which tells communities what they must do”.
“It’s not just about measures once there“, but measures of how we can anticipate these scenarios at the moment when we start to see certain indicators start to increase, because by acting when the curve increases exponentially, we have already seen that this brings us complications”, he explained.
García hopes that with this document, all the details of which will be known on October 17 after the Public Health Commission, “complications” like those of last year are avoided. “You have already seen the complications we had last year in implementing a measure that we considered fundamental, namely the wearing of masks in health centers, when the curve had skyrocketed. We believe we can act sooner and that is why we need this document,” he stressed.
Concretely, the head of Health explained that the text will be used to propose indicators making it possible to characterize the epidemiological situation on the basis of a combination of different epidemiological indicators such as transmission, severity, incidence rate, rate hospitalization, admission to intensive care or lethality.
“This had only been done previously with Covid-19 and that is why it is pioneering that, from the ministry, we are promoting that this is also done with this year’s flu epidemic, so that the bull don’t catch us,” added the minister. .
