Europe may be moving towards COVID-19 pandemic ‘endgame’: WHO

Days after World Health Organization (WHO) Head-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned world leaders that the Covid-19 pandemic ‘is nowhere near over’, WHO’s Europe director stated on Sunday that the Omicron variant has shifted the pandemic into a new phase and might bring it to a stop in Europe.

During an interview, the WHO’s Europe director Hans Kluge said, ‘It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame’. He went on to say that by March, Omicron might have infected 60% of Europeans. Once the current Omicron wave that is sweeping 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’.

‘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.

On the other hand, on Sunday, senior US scientist Anthony Fauci voiced similar hope. ‘Things are looking good’, Fauci said, adding that this Week with Covid-19 instances dropping quite substantially in regions of the United States.

While cautioning against complacency, Fauci stated that if the current drop in case of numbers in places such as the northeast of the United States continues, ‘I believe that you will start to see a turnaround throughout the entire country’.

Last week, the WHO regional office for Africa reported that Covid infections had dropped in the region, and mortality were on the decline for the first time since the virus’s Omicron-dominated fourth wave peaked.

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The Omicron strain, which has been found in experiments to be more infectious than Delta but to cause less severe infection in vaccinated persons, has sparked long-awaited optimism that Covid-19 is shifting from a pandemic to a more manageable endemic virus like seasonal flu. Kluge, on the other hand, emphasised that it was yet too early to declare Covid-19 endemic.

‘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.