The director of WHO Europe, Hans Kluge, said today that the Ómicron variant, which can infect 60% of Europeans by March, started a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe that could bring it to an end.
“It is plausible that the region is reaching the end of the pandemic”, said the main official of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe, still urging caution, due to the unpredictability of the virus.
“When the Ómicron wave diminishes, there will be, for a few weeks or months, general immunity. Either because of the vaccine or because people will be immune due to infections, in addition to a break due to seasonality”, added Kluge, while acknowledging that the stage of endemicity has not yet been reached.
“Endemic means (…) that we can predict what will happen. This virus has surprised us more than once. We must therefore be very careful”, insisted the WHO official in Europe.
In the WHO Europe region – which includes 53 countries, some of them located in Central Asia – Ómicron was responsible for 15% of new Covid-19 cases on January 18, more than half of the previous week, according to data from the WHO. WHO.
In the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA), this variant emerged at the end of November, proving to be more contagious than Delta, and is now dominant, according to data from the European health agency.
Kluge believes that, given the recent increase in cases of contamination, health policies should now focus on “minimizing disruption and protecting vulnerable people”, rather than seeking to reduce the intensity of virus transmission.
Covid-19 has caused at least 5,58 million deaths worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the latest report by the Agence France-Presse.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
A new variant, Ómicron, classified as worrying and very contagious by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been detected in Southern Africa and, since the South African health authorities gave the alert in November, has become dominant in several countries. , including in Portugal.
Comments