The emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic could be over in 2022 – but it’s still not time to relax, the World Health Organization has warned.
Dr Hans Kluge, WHO Europe regional director, said Omicron now accounts for 31.8% of cases across the European region, up from 15% the previous week, and 6.3% the week before that.
“The pandemic is far from over, but I am hopeful we can end the emergency phase in 2022 and address other health threats that urgently require our attention,” said Dr Kluge.
He said while Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, there has been a rapid rise in hospitalisations, in addition to Delta cases and a high number of incidental admissions.
“Fortunately, hospitalisations with Omicron result much less frequently in ICU admission,” he said. “As predicted, most people needing intensive care across the region are unvaccinated.”
Dr Kluge said two years to the day after France reported the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the WHO Europe region, there should be pride in how far the world has come and he praised the rapid rollout of vaccines, calling it “one of the greatest scientific achievements in decades”.
Despite that, every hour since the pandemic’s onset, 99 people in the WHO Europe region have died because of COVID-19 – more than 1.7 million people – and gains in poverty reduction have been reversed, with more than four million people now pushed under the $5.50 US a day poverty line.
He added that children’s education and mental well-being have also suffered.
“We must pay an historical tribute to our health workers, who have borne the brunt of this crisis and continue to put themselves in harm’s way in the service of their patients” said Dr Kluge.
“We cannot say that they have come out intact: research shows that as many as 43% of frontline health workers are experiencing significant levels of anxiety, and a large proportion of clinical staff working in intensive care now meet the clinical threshold for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Supporting them and their mental health must be a central pillar of building back better. With them, we recognise the sacrifices made by almost all of us, knowing that these sacrifices have been much bigger for the people already underserved in life.”
He warned it was too early to relax about COVID-19 coming to an end, saying the coming weeks will result in millions of infections, while new variants are likely.
“But with strong surveillance and monitoring of new variants, high vaccination uptake and third doses, ventilation, affordable equitable access to antivirals, targeted testing, and shielding high-risk groups with high quality masks and physical distancing if and when a new variant appears, I believe that a new wave could no longer require the return to pandemic-era population-wide lockdowns or similar measures,” he added.
The note of caution was echoed yesterday by WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
He told a conference: “It’s true that we will be living with COVID for the foreseeable future, and that we will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases, which will provide a platform for preparedness for future pandemics. But learning to live with COVID cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride.
“It cannot mean that we accept almost 50 thousand deaths a week, from a preventable and treatable disease. It cannot mean that we accept an unacceptable burden on our health systems, when every day, exhausted health workers go once again to the front line.
“It cannot mean that we ignore the consequences of long COVID, which we don’t yet fully understand. It cannot mean that we gamble on a virus whose evolution we cannot control, nor predict.”
Leave a Reply