Amid a decline in COVID-19 deaths, Spain wants European officials to consider whether the detailed tracking that the pandemic has so far required should be abandoned to a monitoring system, the AP reports.

That change would mean treating COVID-19 as an endemic disease rather than a pandemic, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said, adding that the rate of deaths in reported cases has dropped dramatically since the pandemic began.

Sánchez said that he believes they have the conditions to start assessing with caution, slowly, opening the debate at the technical level and at the level of medical professionals, as well as at the European level, the evolution of the disease with different parameters than have been the case so far.

The Prime Minister confirmed a report by the country's leading newspaper, El País, that under a new monitoring system already being developed by Spanish health authorities, it will not be necessary to register every new infection and that people with symptoms will not necessarily be tested, but they will continue to receive treatment.

El País reported that the plan would be for a network of carefully selected health facilities and specialists to report, in a system similar to the survey system used in Europe to track flu, the evolution of COVID-19 outbreaks - what is technically called "sentinel surveillance" rather than the current "universal surveillance" method.

Health Secretary Carolina Darias has discussed the proposal with some of her counterparts in the European Union, Sanchez said, without going into detail.