- Tedros warns against lurching between ‘panic and neglect’
- Pandemic in third year, with nearly 6 million dead
- More variants likely to follow Omicron, WHO warns
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday that it was dangerous to assume the Omicron variant would herald the end of COVID-19’s acutest phase, exhorting nations to stay focused to beat the pandemic, reports Reuters.
Omniums omicron is not the last variant
“It’s dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant and that we are in the end game,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a WHO executive board meeting of the two-year pandemic that has killed nearly 6 million people.
“On the contrary, globally the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.”
Combating covid
Though Omicron has sent total cases soaring to nearly 350 million, its less lethal impact and the increasing prevalence of vaccines has led to optimism in some parts that the worst of the pandemic may have passed.
Countries must maximise strategies and tools already available, such as testing and inoculation, for the global health emergency to end this year, he said.
But he insisted that “we can end COVID-19 as a global health emergency, and we can do it this year,” by reaching goals like WHO’s target to vaccinate 70% of the population of each country by the middle of this year, with a focus on people who are at the highest risk of COVID-19, and improving testing and sequencing rates to track the virus and its emerging variants more closely.
Ending the covid
Tedros laid out an array of achievements and concerns in global health over issues like reducing tobacco use, fighting resistance to anti-microbial treatments, and risks of climate change on human health. But he said “ending the acute phase of the pandemic must remain our collective priority.”
Living with covid
“It’s true that we will be living with COVID for the foreseeable future and that we will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases” to help prepare for future pandemics, Tedros said. “But learning to live with COVID cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride. It cannot mean that we accept almost 50,000 deaths a week from a preventable and treatable disease.”
In stark terms, Tedros also appealed for strengthening WHO and increasing funding for it to help stave off health crises.
“Let me put it plainly: If the current funding model continues, WHO is being set up to fail,” he said. “The paradigm shift in world health that is needed now must be matched by a paradigm shift in funding the world’s health organization.”
The head of WHO’s European region, Dr. Hans Kluge, said separately in a statement that omicron “offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization,” but cautioned: “Our work is not done.” He was alluding to signs that the new variant has shown to bring with it less severe disease, even if it’s more transmissible.
Disparities
He lamented “huge disparities” in access to vaccines, and echoed concerns from other WHO officials that areas where people are less immunized could allow the virus to adapt — and possibly lead to new variants.
Kluge offered a more hopeful note, even if he said “it is almost a given that new COVID-19 variants will emerge and return.”
He said that practices like strong surveillance of new variants, high vaccination uptake, regular ventilation of indoor areas, affordable equitable access to antiviral drugs, targeted testing, mask-wearing and physical distancing, “if and when a new variant appears, I believe that a new wave could no longer require the return to pandemic-era population-wide lockdowns or similar measures,” he said.
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