EUROPE COULD BE HEADED FOR PANDEMIC ‘ENDGAME’: WHO

Sun 23 January 2022:

According to the WHO Europe director, the Omicron form has shifted the Covid-19 pandemic into a new phase and may bring it to an end in Europe.

“It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” Hans Kluge told AFP in an interview, adding that Omicron could infect 60 percent of Europeans by March.

Once the current surge of Omicron currently sweeping across Europe subsides, “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity, either thanks to the vaccine or because people have immunity due to the infection, and also lowering seasonality.”

“So we anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back,” Kluge said.

The Omicron variation, which has been shown in studies to cause less severe infection in vaccinated people than Delta, has sparked long-awaited hope that Covid-19 is beginning to transition from a pandemic to a more manageable endemic virus like seasonal flu.

“There is a lot of talk about endemic but endemic means … that it is possible to predict what’s going to happen. This virus has surprised (us) more than once so we have to be very careful”, Kluge said.

According to the WHO, Omicron accounted for 15% of new cases in the WHO Europe region, which includes 53 nations, including several in Central Asia, as of January 18, up from 6.3 percent a week earlier.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent