“It should not be categorized as ‘mild’ (…) it is causing hospitalizations and is killing,” warns the director general of the World Health Organization.
The wave of COVID infections associated with the boom in the omicron variant continues to grow at a rate never before seen in the pandemic, with an increase of 70% of cases in the world last week, although at the same time the deaths keep going down, as reported today by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Last week there were 41,000 deaths from COVID on the planet, 10% less than in the previous seven days, and it is the fourth consecutive week of decreases in that indicator, despite the fact that in regions such as America the contagions doubled in the period studied, according to the latest epidemiological report.
The figures invite us to trust that the pandemic will evolve into less lethal forms, although the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, insisted in his first press conference in 2022 that it is still premature to conclude that the omicron variant is a new, lighter stage of the coronavirus.
“Appears to be less severe than delta, especially in vaccinated people, but it should not be categorized as ‘mild’, because it is also causing hospitalizations and is killing ”, warned the Ethiopian expert, after recalling that many health systems in the world are saturated in the current “Tsunami of contagions”.
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The director of the agency for Health Emergencies, Mike Ryan, added at the same press conference that the growing opinion that the omicron variant could be the last of the pandemic, since it could immunize that important percentage of the population that is contagious, is overly optimistic.
“It is wishful thinking, because there were also high levels of transmission with previous variants”, warned the Irish expert, who recalled that other similar forecasts ended up being wrong, such as that the “delta version” was going to be the culmination of the evolution of the coronavirus.
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“This virus continues to have a lot of energy, and while millions of people are still not vaccinated there are still many opportunities for it to expand and generate new variants,” he said, while the head of the WHO anticovid unit, Maria Van Kerkhove, opined What is it “very unlikely omicron is the last variant”.
WHO experts insisted that it remains crucial to extend vaccination, even though vaccines have lost their neutralizing power Faced with the omicron variant and many vaccinated people are infected with COVID-19 in the current wave of cases.
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Vaccines “are still very effective in preventing severe forms of the disease and reduce deaths ”against all known variants of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, said Van Kerkhove.
Optimism after less lethality
In the year that begins, the WHO insists, the acute phase of the pandemic can be ended, despite the current daily records of infections, which already they have overcome the barrier of the two million new global cases per day.
In order to end this acute phase, Tedros insisted that the goal must be to get the 70% of the population of all countries is vaccinated, although he warned that at the current rate more than a hundred territories will not reach that goal, in the same way that at the end of 2021 the objective of 40% was not achieved.
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“Inequality in vaccines kills people, destroys jobs and harms global economic recovery,” said Tedros, who lamented that “some countries are already giving their citizens a fourth dose while others they don’t have enough supplies to immunize their health workers and risk groups ”.
“Distributing vaccines and more booster vaccines in a small number of countries will not end the pandemic while billions of others people remain completely unprotected”, Alerted the head of the WHO. (I)
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