Covid pandemic ‘is far from over’, says WHO

The Covid-19 pandemic “is far from over”, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday (18), warning against the idea that the omicron variant is benign.

“The omicron continues to sweep the planet. (…) Make no mistake, the omicron causes hospitalizations and deaths, and even the less severe cases overwhelm healthcare institutions,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

“This pandemic is far from over and given the incredible growth of the omicron around the world, new variants are likely to emerge,” he added.

On January 11, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) estimated that while the disease is still in the pandemic phase, the spread of the omicron variant will turn Covid-19 into an endemic disease that humanity can learn to deal with.

“As immunity increases in the population – and with the micron, there will be a lot of natural immunity beyond vaccination – we will rapidly move towards a scenario closer to endemicity,” said Marco Cavaleri, head of vaccine strategy at the Amsterdam-based EMA. .

In Switzerland, Health Minister Alain Berset said last week that the omicron variant could be “the beginning of the end” of the pandemic.

But the WHO chief is much more cautious and once again stressed that the omicron variant is not benign.

“In some countries, Covid cases seem to have peaked, giving hope that the worst of this latest wave is over, but no country is out of the woods yet,” he told reporters.

Tedros expressed particular concern about the fact that many countries have low rates of vaccination against Covid: “People are more at risk of suffering from severe forms of the disease or of dying if they are not vaccinated”.

Still according to him, the omni may be less serious on average, but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading, undermines the overall response and costs more lives.