WHO warns – Politico: Too early to treat coronavirus as endemic

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The World Health Organization (WHO) told governments on Tuesday that it was too early to predict that the COVID-19 pandemic would burn itself out, as it warned that more than half of people in Europe will fall ill within the next two months.

With the highly contagious Omicron strain unleashing a new tidal wave from west to east sweeping the region, hospitalizations are expected to rise, Hans Kluge, head of the World Health Organization for Europe, told a news conference.

“It is a challenge to health systems and service delivery in many countries as Omicron has spread rapidly, and threatens to overwhelm many other countries,” Kluge said.

The WHO’s intervention came after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez signaled a shift in policy away from case counting and quarantine, toward a risk-based approach typical of managing outbreaks of diseases such as influenza that seeks to protect the most vulnerable.

The World Health Organization said it was not time now to conclude that the epidemic will fade, as the Corona virus is able to evolve and pose a new threat.

“In terms of endemicity, we are still very far away,” said Catherine Smallwood, WHO’s chief emergency officer for Europe, at the same briefing.

“Settlement assumes, first of all, that there is a stable circulation of the virus at predictable levels, and known and expected waves of epidemic transmission,” she said. “We really need to refrain from acting as if it was an epidemic before… the virus itself behaves as if it was endemic.”

Sanchez said Spain plans to move from its current approach to managing the epidemic to a so-called sentinel surveillance system, with cases reported by a sample of hospitals and doctors used to estimate disease prevalence and direct public health measures, such as vaccination programmes. .

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under pressure from lawmakers in his ruling Conservative party to lift restrictions now that the country’s record wave of Omicron infections appears to have peaked,

The World Health Organization said 50 of the 53 countries in the region stretching from Europe and Central Asia have reported cases of Omicron, which is rapidly becoming the dominant viral strain in Western Europe and is now spreading in the Balkans. At that rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research center in Washington, estimates that more than 50 percent of the population across the region will have Omicron in the next six to eight weeks, added.

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