A World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson stated on Friday that the end of the coronavirus pandemic was still a long way off, citing an increase in cases in its latest weekly data, despite an increase in COVID-19 cases in several parts of the world.
Margaret Harris, when asked about the timing of the pandemic’s end by a journalist at a Geneva media briefing, said it was “far from over,” according to reports
“We are definitely in the middle of the pandemic,” she added.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported an 8% increase in COVID-19 cases detected in the last week, with more than 11 million positive test results.
“These increases are occurring despite reductions in testing in some countries, which means the cases we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg”, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus as saying, who warned that when cases tick up, so do deaths.
Continued local outbreaks and surges are to be expected, especially in areas where transmission-control measures have been lifted, but there are ‘unacceptably high’ levels of mortality in many countries, particularly where vaccination levels are low among susceptible populations, according to Gebreyesus.
“Each country is facing a different situation with different challenges, but the pandemic is not over”, he reiterated.
Dr Mike Ryan, WHO’s Executive Director of the Health Emergencies Programme clarified that the COVID-19 virus has not ‘settled down’ into a purely seasonal or predictable pattern yet.
As per the report, the expert added that the virus is still ‘very fit’ and it’s moving around easily and in the context of waning immunity and “vaccines not acting perfectly against infection, the virus will likely continue to echo around the world.”
“It will be high in some parts sometimes and then move and be higher again, it will move to another area where immunity is waning. The virus will pick up pockets of susceptibility, and we will survive on those pockets for months until another pocket opens,” Dr Ryan said.
“This is how viruses work. They establish themselves in a community and they will move quickly to the next community that’s unprotected”, he further explained saying that experts have seen similar patterns with the polio virus.
WHO’s COVID-19 Technical Lead, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, reported that a combination of factors are fuelling the increase of cases worldwide, beginning with a more transmissible variant.
“We still have Omicron which is transmitting at a very intense level around the world. We have sub-lineages of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2. BA.2 is more transmissible, and this is the most transmissible variant we have seen of the SARS-COV2 virus to date”, Dr Kerkhove warned.
The experst informed that in the last 30 days of more than 400,000 sequences sampled, 99.9% are Omicron, and 75% correspond to the BA.2 variant. “We do not see an increase in severity with BA.2. However, with huge numbers of cases you will see increase hospitalisations and we have seen this in country after country”, she noted.
Like WHO director General, Dr Kerkhove also pointed out that another factor influencing the increase of numbers is the lifting of public health and social measures. “Lifting of the use of masks, lifting of physical distancing, lifting of restrictions limiting people’s movement, this provides the virus an opportunity to spread”, she cautioned.