Covid-19: more than 50% of Europeans affected by Omicron within 2 months, according to WHO

More than half of Europeans could be affected by the Omicron variant within two months given the “tsunami” current, estimated this Tuesday the World Health Organization (WHO), two years exactly after the announcement of the first death officially linked to the coronavirus in China.

“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) predicts that more than 50% of the region’s population will be infected with Omicron within the next six to eight weeks,” WHO Europe director Hans Kluge alerted during an online press conference. According to him, the mutations presented by this variant “allow it to adhere more easily to human cells, which can infect even people who have been previously infected or vaccinated.”

The region, which has 53 countries and stretches as far as Central Asia, recorded more than 7 million new cases of Covid-19 in the first week of 2022. In addition, according to WHO data, Since January 10, 26 countries have reported that more than 1% of their population tested positive for Covid-19 every week. For Hans Kluge, the scale is “unprecedented”.

The current wave “challenges healthcare systems and service delivery in many countries where Omicron has spread at high speed, and threatens to spill over into many others,” he lamented, noting all the same the effectiveness of vaccines against the virus, with “a smaller fraction of people hospitalized” and death rates “weaker”.

However, the WHO has also noted that it is currently impossible to qualify Covid-19 as endemic as the flu is. “We still have a virus that evolves quite quickly and poses new challenges. So we are certainly not at the point where we can qualify it as endemic”, said WHO Europe’s emergency manager, Catherine Smallwood.

“This virus surprised us more than once”, concluded the regional director. “The main objective to be achieved for 2022 is to stabilize the pandemic”. Several countries have already chosen to strengthen their health restrictions. In Italy, vaccination has become compulsory for those 50 and over, when France intends to introduce a vaccination pass before the end of the month.

Since its arrival in the world, the pandemic has killed nearly 5.5 million people, but could actually be two to three times higher, according to the WHO.