Editorial: The campaign for salvation

Our experiences from the management of the COVID-19 pandemic are not the best.

The virus has proven extremely dangerous and capable of making headway in human communities, constantly testing our endurance and discipline.

Moreover, it is evolving dynamically, adapting and exploiting human frailty, complacency, and inhibitions. It always appears in the fissures of health systems and of epidemiological controls and thus it makes its way into the community and constantly demonstrates its capacity to spread.

Whatever measures may have been implemented at various points proved inadequate in checking its pervasiveness and the ability of the COVID-19 to attack even advanced countries with strong health systems.

Until now, the pandemic has unfolded in three waves and despite any successes of public health authorities globally, we are confronted by a fourth, exceptionally transmissible and dangerous wave of the pandemic, as it has demonstrated that it also attacks the younger generation, including children.

The Indian variant, or better yet the Delta variant as the medical community has referred to it, became predominant in the UK, is threatening Portugal, and is spreading rapidly throughout Europe.

The spread in our country - which is favoured by the expected tourist wave and trips - is most dense on the islands of Crete, Mykonos, and Santorini.

As time goes by, almost certainly super-spreading loci emerge, threatening to demolish everything on their path, including the basic wall of immunity that citizens have built with great effort through vaccination.

Obviously, there are no magic solutions. Restrictive measures cannot be reinstated more intensely, but masks and other public health measures should be retained as a minimum...