By John Ikani
On Monday, the UK reported a further 142,224 confirmed cases of the virus and 77 deaths. A number of hospitals have declared “critical” incidents due to staff absences and rising pressures caused by Covid.
The World Health Organization has warned that half of Europe will have been infected with the Omicron variant of Covid-19 within six to eight weeks.
More than seven million new Covid cases were reported in the region in the first week of 2022, with numbers more than doubling over a two-week period.
On Monday, the UK reported a further 142,224 confirmed cases of the virus and 77 deaths. A number of hospitals have declared “critical” incidents due to staff absences and rising pressures caused by Covid.
Elsewhere, hospital numbers are also rising. France’s Health Minister Olivier Veran warned last week that January would be tough for hospitals.
Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday, the European director for the World Health Organisation, Dr Hans Kluge, said: “At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecasts that more than 50 per cent of the population in the region will be infected with Omicron in the next 6-8 weeks.”
The latest data confirms the variant’s high transmissibility, according to Kluge, “because the mutations it has enable it to adhere to human cells more easily, and it can infect even those who have been previously infected or vaccinated.”
This “unprecedented scale of transmission” has led to rising numbers of covid-19 hospitalizations, Kluge told reporters. “I am also deeply concerned that as the variant moves east, we have yet to see its full impact in countries where levels of vaccination uptake are lower.”
Some European countries with high vaccination rates have eased restrictions or reduced isolation periods for the immunized as part of an effort to avoid more disruptions to daily life, while others are tightening curbs on people who have not been vaccinated.
WHO officials including Kluge maintain that existing coronavirus vaccines provide protection against severe disease and death including in the case of an omicron infection.
The global health body said in an update that more research was underway to determine the extent. It also said omicron growth rates have declined or stabilized in many countries but remain “significantly higher” than for the delta variant.
Despite reports of a higher degree of asymptomatic cases and lower proportion of hospitalisations for Omicron cases, the WHO said it was too early to treat the disease as endemic — meaning a regularly occurring milder disease like the flu.
“We still have a virus that’s evolving quite quickly and posing quite new challenges. So we’re certainly not at the point of being able to call it endemic,” WHO senior emergencies officer Catherine Smallwood told reporters.
“This virus, as we know, has surprised us more than once… The prime aspirational goal for 2022 is to stabilise the pandemic,” Kluge concluded.
Worldwide, 5.5 million deaths have been associated with Covid-19, according to a toll compiled by AFP from official sources.
The WHO says the real toll may be two to three times that figure.
