Teacher response to Easter waivers: some restrictions will have to be long

Chaplinsk: It was immediately clear that I would not go very far on fear alone.

Professor Saulius Čaplinskas assessed the current restrictions on the “Facts and Opinions” program and answered whether they were justified just before the holiday period. According to him, there is little that can be achieved with prohibitions and fears, and the effect is very short-lived.

“Let’s take a different look at how we handle the AIDS pandemic. There has been no question for a long time that it prohibits the fear of fear for a short period of time. Let’s remember the AIDS pandemic, when they closed gay hubs in San Francisco and so on. We only had that element of fear activated for a short time, then people started taking risks. As for this infection, exactly the same. What’s more, if people with HIV do not start treatment on time, they die one hundred percent In this case, most realize that they will get sick easily, especially the young, and it was immediately clear that they would not go very far with fear alone.

On the other hand, certain restrictions are unavoidable and will have to last a long time, but in principle they must be taken by each person personally. When we talk about fighting, just like we talk about HIV, we mean our personal behavior. In one case, sexual and drug use, in this case, communication with everyone, just breathing air. For people to notice and behave in one way or another, it doesn’t take fear, an informed decision to make a person understand. For example, how to celebrate Easter in a closed circle and how to do it in the safest way possible, and not just to prohibit, prevent and things like that ”, says S. Čaplinskas.

When asked if the decisions were in the hands of the teacher, if those three Easter days would be “closed” or “open”, S. Čaplinskas assured that we could not completely prevent the danger of the virus.

“It just came to our attention then. After all, we now have a lot of instruments. The very people who have been vaccinated or who get sick would be an added incentive for others to get vaccinated or tested. It doesn’t matter, with antibody tests. or antigens, depending on what we are looking for, and I think it is important to realize, we cannot completely prevent this danger, neither with prohibitions nor with anything, which means reducing the harm, reducing the risk of infection and transmission virus. At least for those people who are sick, who have had tests and follow the same recommendations to visit their elderly parents, I think they should do it, ”says S. Čaplinskas.

Usonis: people have practically no decision-making power

Vytautas Usonis, professor at Vilnius University Children’s Clinic, asked if restrictions were needed at Easter and said that banning was the easiest way, but we can see the experience of other countries after they decided to release restrictions during the holidays. or certain days off. .

“It is a fact to face Easter. The question of how, because we really see the experience of different countries, we see what happened after, for example, Christmas in Portugal, after other holidays in other countries, in Lithuania after Free Late last year and where is that average? golden – it’s hard to tell. The simplest option is insurance, it is the simplest, but whether it will really work is a big question here, because people are tired of insurance, people are starting to resist insurance. We see many fully justified disputes, such as a situation where a family gathers in a large property and a completely different situation if the same family gathers in a one or two bedroom apartment. In an epidemiological sense, they are completely different situations ”, says the professor.

According to him, the greatest lack of understanding and communication in our society is that many things are tried to solve through prohibitions.

“Until now, our people have practically no decisions. I thought it was important to explain what I was doing wrong and what to do to be good. Those things are simple and we’ve been talking about them for years: distance, disinfection, masks and everything else, says the professor.

According to him, the current situation is significantly different from a year ago.

“The situation, which was a year ago, has radically changed. If a year ago those restrictions arose because we did not have much of what we have today, then restricting that position of power is effective, but a year has passed, and let’s consider the information work that could really be done better. It is not a one day decision that something unexpected has happened now and we decide what to do during Easter. And what we did throughout the year ”, says the teacher.

Has the current vaccination strategy been exhausted?

When V. Usonis asked him if the 42 percent -more or less-, the professor assured that this is not the figure that would allow us to speak of public immunity.

“It is enough to affect the number of serious diseases, the number of deaths, but it is not enough to speak of public immunity as a guarantor of public safety. Going further in this direction, a third of the Lithuanian population is vaccinated, but do you find in those statistical tables which group of society is safe today? We can say that in the Santara clinics the vaccination of the staff is around ninety percent, which is a very good figure. I think that in other cinemas, where people see first-hand what a coronavirus is, what it is through an infection, at least there is no need to shake people very hard, ”says the professor.

“Now we have to set ourselves a new goal, we have to talk about the formation of public immunity and, consequently, the tasks must be coordinated according to the goal.” Of course, if you had to choose who to inject the dose, or an elderly person with, for example, a chronic disease, or a young and healthy person, the priority should remain, but it should not be a strategic direction. as it has already been exhausted. “

Professor S. Čaplinskas said on the show that one of the main reasons why vaccination of older people is stagnating is that some older people simply do not have the opportunity to get vaccinated.

“This is a normal result that could have been achieved with an organization where there was practically no passive campaign, because there was practically no information, in addition to saying that the vaccines had already arrived and a call for vaccination and where to do it. In order for the other person not to make a sufficient decision, they need to know how, why, what can happen, secondly, I lack empathy in this whole response to the coronavirus. On the one hand, when it comes to just bans and the fact that you work from home, and basically people who are not fundamentally affected: the budgetary ones, the academic layer of people. They can reorient, rather than reorient to a business they cannot work on remotely.

So when it comes to people who come to get vaccinated, I touched one side of the coin that a person has to want that vaccine, but do we try to imagine it for a grandmother whose children can live in another municipality and the children cannot? come and that the grandmother does not move and does not come at the appointed time. If we start looking at why some older people who may have been vaccinated a long time ago but haven’t been, this is probably a common reason. “

People have many questions

S. Čaplinskas says on the show that there are many specific problems that arise naturally for people. And the current government’s ambition to increase vaccination at a particularly fast rate sounds a bit too optimistic.

“We are talking now just to appreciate the fact that there will be enough vaccines and to keep thinking about how to vaccinate those vaccines, but will people go? This question remains open. Let’s see what the statistics show.

Only about forty percent of people are really determined to get vaccinated, and there are quite a few skeptics, not to mention those who have decided not to vaccinate, let’s leave them alone, because there will always be people who do not want to, may not be vaccinated or have immunity.

It is very important that everyone who wants this tool get the information they need. For example, do all women who plan to get pregnant know if they can get vaccinated and do Russian-speaking citizens get all the information? There are many specific questions that people may have, not because they are opposed to vaccines, but because they want answers, ”says S. Čaplinskas.