More than half of Europeans will be infected with Omicron in the next two months, warns WHO

More than 50% of Europeans will be infected with the Ómicron variant of coronavirus in the next two months if the current rate of infections is maintained, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday. The variant first identified in South Africa forced several nations to reimpose restrictions and speed up vaccination with booster doses.” At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (IHME) predicts that more than 50% of the region’s population will have been infected with the omicron variant in the next six to eight weeks,” said Hans Kluge, director of the WHO Europe region. people who have already had Covid-19 and are vaccinated. The WHO Europe region includes 53 countries and territories, including some in Central Asia.For Kluge, this “unprecedented” transmission of the virus translates into an increase in hospital admissions but not an increase in mortality. “There are a much higher number of asymptomatic cases,” he said, underscoring the efficacy of the vaccines. However, the WHO assures that for now the virus cannot be classified as endemic, as is the case with the influenza virus.” We have at the moment a rapidly evolving virus that poses new challenges. We are not at a time when it can be described as endemic,” said CATHERINE Smallwood, WHO Europe’s Head of Emergencies.
The warning comes on the exact two-year anniversary of the death of a 61-year-old man in the Chinese city of Wuhan, considered to this day the first person to die from Covid-19, a disease that then still had no name and was considered a strange pneumonia, and that, since then, has claimed more than 5.5 million lives. A few months after its appearance in Wuhan, China controlled the pandemic with a mixture of lockdowns, border closures and mass screenings, but recent outbreaks put this strategy on the tightrope, weeks before the Beijing Winter Olympics.Authorities in the city of Anyang, in the central province of Henan, ordered its five million inhabitants to stay at home and not drive in private vehicles on Monday. Health experts insist that vaccines remain the most effective weapon in the face of the pandemic. But the WHO warned that the mere repetition of boosters will not be enough to prevent the appearance of variants and urged to improve vaccines to curb infections. In addition, inequality in access to vaccines was again denounced on Tuesday, with the World Economic Forum warning that this gap could weaken the fight against other global challenges, such as climate change. The global divergence in access to vaccines “will create tensions – within states and between states – which could aggravate the effects of the pandemic and complicate the coordination needed to address common challenges,” the foundation warned.

Original source in Spanish