The director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Europe office said on Thursday that the region is entering a “plausible endgame” as COVID-19 deaths start to slow down.
Hans Kluge said during a news briefing that European countries have a “singular opportunity” to take control of COVID-19 transmission because of several factors, according to The Associated Press:
1. High levels of immunization from the vaccines and natural infection
2. The virus’ tendency to spread less in warmer weather
3. The lower severity of the omicron variant
“This period of higher protection should be seen as a cease-fire that could bring us enduring peace,” Kluge added at the briefing.
Looking ahead: Kluge said health authorities should be able to control any new variant that may emerge, noting that spring “leaves us with the possibility for a long period of tranquility and a much higher level of population defense against any resurgence in transmission,” the AP reported.
However, Kluge urged everyone in the region to get vaccinated and called for “a drastic and uncompromising increase in vaccine-sharing across borders.”
The context: Countries in Europe, including Denmark, Norway and Britain, have slowly been lifting coronavirus restrictions in recent weeks, with Sweden being the latest, according to the AP.
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World faces ‘bumpy, difficult’ Covid transition, says senior scientist
Tensions in societies around the world over the current Covid situation are going to be very difficult to handle, one of Britain’s most senior scientific figures has warned.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, who stepped down as a government scientific adviser in November last year, warned the idea of simply “exiting” a pandemic is not realistic.
“I just don’t think you wake up on Tuesday and it’s finished. It’s not going to happen like that,” he said in an online meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine.
“The transition from [the] acute phase of the pandemic to something new, not yet defined, it’s really difficult – bumpy, different around the world, different within a single country, with the degree of inequity that’s happened globally, but also nationally,” he said.
Farrar noted one problem is that while some people may argue the pandemic is now in the past, and the situation in the middle of the pandemic was exaggerated, others believe it’s far from over.
US to donate an additional 500m Covid vaccines to poorer countries, says Biden
“And so the tensions, I think, within societies are going to be very difficult to handle,” he said.
Farrar added that while he has sympathy with the disruption of education and the health and economic impacts of Covid he is concerned about the speed at which some want to move on.
“My concern is that there will be too fast a shift to saying it’s all over and we will lose the humility of accepting that we’re only two years into a novel human pathogen, that is still a huge amount of uncertainty,” he said, adding it is also crucial to resolve the problem of vaccine inequality.
While Farrar said the most likely scenario is that there will be a transition to Omicron becoming endemic, as the variant is less severe than others, it is not the only possibility.
“My worry in the push to try and move on from this [is that] we ignore those other scenarios, which are less rosy but we should be absolutely prepared for,” he said.
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Farrar added that while he agreed it is time to begin easing Covid restrictions in the UK, he is in favour of keeping some measures.
“I would be in favour of continuing for instance, mask wearing on public transport, in enclosed spaces, etc,” he said. “And I would be pushing ever harder on trying to encourage people to be vaccinated, get their boosting doses, and make sure that everybody has access to the vaccines from a UK perspective.”
Farrar also warned that he has deep concerns about the global Covid situation, warning that the pandemic has been made worse “by a catastrophic failure of global diplomacy”.
“The ongoing geopolitics of east /west but increasingly, understandably, north/south, because of vaccine inequity is going to lead to really troubling years ahead and will have ramifications beyond pandemics to our ability to come together to solve issues of inequality, of issues of climate change, of issues of drug resistance, of issues of migration and conflict,” he said.
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India’s death toll exceeds 500,000
India’s death toll from Covid-19 has crossed 500,000, Reuters reports, a level many health experts say was breached last year but obscured by inaccurate surveys and unaccounted dead in the hinterlands, where millions remain vulnerable to the disease.
The country, which has the fourth-highest tally of deaths globally, recorded 400,000 deaths by July last year after the devastating outbreak from the Delta variant of the coronavirus, according to official data. Some experts believe the figures were much higher.
“Our study published in the journal Science estimates 3 million Covic deaths in India until mid-2021 using three different databases,” Chinmay Tumbe, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad who co-authored the study, told Reuters.
Last month, the Indian government dismissed the study as baseless in a notification saying there is a robust system of birth and death reporting.
A makeshift Covid-19 care facility at Chennai Trade Centre. Photograph: Idrees Mohammed/EPA
India’s states record deaths from Covid-19 after collating data from their districts. In the last few months, several states have updated the number of deaths, some under pressure from the country’s top court. In most instances, authorities said there were lapses due to delayed registrations and other administrative errors.
India is currently in the midst of a third wave of the coronavirus led by the Omicron variant, which some top experts say is already in community transmission although federal officials say most cases are mild.
Last month, the government eased testing norms and told states to drop mandatory testing for contacts of confirmed cases unless they were old or battling other conditions. But, with the number of tests falling, the government issued a revised circular warning states they would miss the spread of the virus.
But, as many infected people took the option of not testing at all, total infection numbers may not reflect the extent and severity of cases, said Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University near the capital who has been tracking the spread of the virus.
According to official figures, India’s overall number of Covid-19 infections has reached 41.95 million, the second-highest globally behind the United States.
India’s cumulative tally of 500,055 deaths on Friday included 1,072 fatalities reported over the last 24 hours, according to the federal health ministry. Out of this, 335 deaths were reported from the southern state of Kerala that has, for weeks, been updating data with deaths from last year.
Russia hurdles daily Covid record again – to almost 170,000 infections
Russia broke its daily Covid record again on Friday with infections surging to 168,201, Reuters reports.
That’s a 242% jump on the 49,127 cases detected on Friday two weeks ago, which was itself a record-breaker.
Russia, gripped by Omicron, has smashed its daily Covid record practially every day for the past two weeks. Thursday saw 155,768 cases.
The labour ministry has recommended working from home. But the Kremlin has ruled out a national lockdown. Meanwhile, at the local level some cities have imposed restrictions to crimp the virus’s spread.
A further 682 deaths from Covid-related causes were reported in the past 24 hours. Russia has the world’s 2nd highest Covid death toll of over 700,000, behind only the US. (Russia has the 9th highest populaiton worldwide.)
