‘Half of Europe’ will have Covid in next eight weeks
THERE were more than seven million new cases of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 across Europe in the first week of January, more than doubling in two weeks, the World Health Organisation has said.
WHO Europe director Dr Hans Kluge said at a media briefing on Tuesday that 26 countries in its region reported that more than 1% of their populations are being infected with Covid-19 each week, warning there is a “closing window of opportunity” for countries to prevent their health systems from being overwhelmed.
He cited estimates from the Institute of Health Metrics at the University of Washington that projected half of the population in western Europe will be infected with Covid19 in the next six to eight weeks.
“Omicron moves faster and wider than any (previous) variant we have seen,” he said.
Dr Kluge called for countries to mandate the use of masks indoors and to prioritise vaccination, including booster doses, of at-risk populations, including health workers and older people.
The WHO’S Geneva headquarters has previously pleaded with rich countries not to offer booster doses and to donate them instead to poorer countries where vulnerable groups have yet to be immunised.
Dr Kluge said he was greatly concerned that as Omicron moves east across Europe, the variant will take a much higher toll on countries with lower vaccination coverage rates.
In Denmark, he noted the hospital admission rate was six times higher in people who were not vaccinated compared with those who were.
Meanwhile, Poland has become the latest European nation to reach the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths related to coronavirus.
Nearly a quarter of those deaths 24,000 - occurred in the most recent wave of infection that began in October, a period in which vaccines have been widely available in the European Union nation.
Health minister Adam Niedzielski said on Tuesday that 493 deaths of people with Covid-19 had been registered in the past day, pushing the death toll to 100,254 in the nation of 38 million people.
The number of new infections has fallen recently following a peak in what officials call the country’s “fourth wave” of Covid-19 driven by the Delta variant, but the Omicron variant is spreading and another large infection wave is looming.
The first two deaths from Omicron were reported on Monday, both in elderly and unvaccinated people.
Mr Niedzielski said there are now 18,000 people in hospital, making this “the most difficult situation compared to other waves”.
Poland has struggled through the pandemic with a health care sector strapped by limited funding and the emigration of many medical professionals to western Europe in past years.
The vast majority of the deaths in the last wave - 83% - are of the unvaccinated. The vaccination rate in Poland is 55.8% - much lower than in western Europe, but much higher than some other central European countries like Bulgaria and Romania.
Poland now joins Italy, the UK, France and Germany as those European nations that have recorded 100,000 deaths.