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The Omicron variant of the coronavirus is expected to infect over half of the population in Europe, but still cannot be treated as a seasonal flu-like endemic disease, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
Europe has registered over 7 million new cases of coronavirus in the first week of 2022 alone, a figure twice as high as a two-week period, WHO Director for Europe Hans Kluge told a news conference.
“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Assessment predicts that more than 50 percent of the population in the region will be infected with Omicron over the next 6-8 weeks,” said Kluge, referring to a research center at the University of Washington.
Fifty of the 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia have registered cases with the new variant, Kluge said.
However, according to recent studies, Omicroni is affecting the upper respiratory tract more than the lungs, causing milder symptoms than previous variants of COVID-19 disease.
But the WHO has said that more studies are needed to prove this.
On January 10, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it might be time to change the way COVID-19 evolution is tracked, and he suggested that a similar method be used for seasonal flu, as he said coronavirus mortality has fallen.
This would mean treating the virus as an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic and states would not record every case nor test all people who show symptoms.
But Chatherine Smallwood, the WHO’s chief emergency officer for Europe, said this could be “a way out”, adding that endemism requires the disease to have a stable and predictable transmission.
“We still have great uncertainty and a virus that is evolving quite rapidly, presenting new challenges. “Of course, we are not yet at the point where we could call it an epidemic.”
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