The director of the organization in Europe, Hans Kluge, said in a press conference that the continent witnessed more than 7 million cases of the mutant were reported in the first week of 2022, more than double compared to the previous two weeks.
“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation expects that more than 50 percent of the continent’s population will develop omicron in the next six to eight weeks,” Kluge said, referring to research by a center at the University of Washington.
Kluge said 50 of the 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia had reported cases of this highly contagious mutant.
However, evidence emerges that Omicron affects the upper respiratory tract more than the lungs, causing symptoms that are milder than previous variants.
However, the World Health Organization warned that more studies are still needed to prove this.
And on Monday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it might be time to change the way Corona patients are tracked, and to think of a method similar to the flu instead, due to the low death toll.
This implies that the virus is treated as an endemic disease, not an epidemic, meaning that not every case will be registered and not all people who show symptoms will be tested.
But the World Health Organization, in the words of its emergency officer, Catherine Smallwood, says that endemicity requires stable and predictable transmission.
“We still have a great deal of uncertainty, and the virus is evolving very quickly, and it poses new challenges. We are certainly not at the point where we can call it endemic,” she added.
“This disease may become endemic in time, but establishing that is a bit difficult at this stage,” she added.
Currently approved vaccines still provide good protection once morest severe infection and the risk of death, but due to the unprecedented scale of transmission, the world is witnessing a rise in hospital admissions, challenging health systems and service delivery in many countries.
The New York Times quoted World Health Organization officials as saying that there is “deep concern that, as the variable moves east, the world has not yet seen the full impact in countries with low levels of vaccination uptake.”
And the World Health Organization warned once morest treating the virus like seasonal flu, because many of the properties of Omicron are still unknown.
While the World Health Organization has warned for months that the booster doses might further exacerbate inequality in vaccines around the world, its officials said, on Tuesday, that these doses will play a key role in protecting the most vulnerable people from acute infections.
And since Omicron was first discovered in late November, it has spread across the planet at an unprecedented pace during the two years of the pandemic.
A report in the New York Times warned that the mutant Omicron “threatens to cause societal upheaval across the continent.”
“The numbers of infected people will be so high in many places that schools in many countries will not be able to keep all classes open” due to the disease and staff shortages, she added, quoting health experts.
The World Health Organization says the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people in the latest wave is “six times higher than the hospitalization rate for fully vaccinated people”.
In France, the spread of the disease caused the cancellation of 10,452 classes on Monday.
Prime Minister Jan Castex said that in the future, schoolchildren in the country would be allowed to take self-tests instead of the current PCR tests, if someone tested positive to keep the education system running.
“If we close the classes as soon as there is one case, considering the omicron mutant, then all French schools will close within days,” Castix said.