Over 50% of Europeans on track to contract Omicron: WHO

Over 50% of Europeans on track to contract Omicron: WHO

More than half of people in Europe are on track to contract the Omicron coronavirus variant in the next two months if infections continue at current rates, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

Speaking at a press conference, regional director Hans Kluge warned that the Omicron variant represented a "new west-to-east tidal wave sweeping across" the European region.

The WHO's European region comprises 53 countries and territories including several in Central Asia, and Kluge noted that 50 of them had confirmed cases of the Omicron variant.

Kluge said the "unprecedented scale of transmission" now meant countries were seeing rising hospitalisations from Covid-19, but added that mortality rates were still stable. 

Referencing data collected over the last few weeks, Kluge said the variant was confirmed to be more transmissible and "the mutations it has enable it to adhere to human cells more easily, and it can infect even those who have been previously infected or vaccinated."

Despite reports of a higher degree of asymptomatic cases and lower proportion of hospitalisations for Omicron cases, the WHO said it was too early to treat the disease as endemic -- meaning a regularly occurring milder disease like the flu.

"This virus, as we know, has surprised us more than once... The prime aspirational goal for 2022 is to stabilise the pandemic," Kluge concluded. 

The WHO says the real toll may be two to three times that figure.

...