We’re closest in Europe to end of the pandemic

With EU cases rising, the UK is approaching endemic status

BRITAIN is set to be the first country in Europe to exit the pandemic as Omicron cases continue to plummet, experts said yesterday.

Latest figures show Covid cases have fallen by 13 per cent over the past week – the first sustained fall since the beginning of November.

Yesterday another 120,821 people tested positive in the UK, down from a peak of 218,724 on January 8. There were 379 deaths recorded. In London, previously the Omicron epicentre, cases are now half the level of before Christmas and hospital admissions are falling rapidly.

Nationally, admissions are also starting to level off and 2,286 Covid patients were admitted to UK hospitals yesterday, lower than in the previous three days. There are currently 19,828 patients in hospital with the virus, but only 820 are on ventilators the lowest figure since October.

Ministers are now confident Britain will be able to weather the Omicron storm

‘We still have a huge amount of uncertainty’

without the need for any further restrictions. They are hopeful that Plan B measures – including face masks and working from home – could be scrapped for good by the end of the month.

Experts believe Omicron, which causes significantly milder illness, will accelerate Covid’s transition to becoming an ‘endemic’ virus just like the common cold.

Professor David Heymann, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the UK was likely to be the first country in the northern hemisphere to reach endemic status due to high immunity levels.

He told a Chatham House briefing yesterday the UK was ‘closest to any country of being out of the pandemic if it isn’t already... and having the disease as endemic as the other four coronaviruses’.

He said population immunity was already high, with 95 per cent now having antibodies. He said this ‘seems to be keeping the virus and its variants at bay, not causing serious illness or death’.

‘It’s now functioning more like an endemic coronavirus than one that is a pandemic,’ he said.

‘If you look in the intensive care units, you’ll see that unfortunately the majority of those people are not vaccinated.’

Yesterday the European arm of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Covid-19 cannot yet be called ‘endemic’, warning that half of Europeans will be infected by the Omicron variant in the next two months.

WHO regional director for Europe Dr Hans Henri Kluge said: ‘Today, the Omicron variant represents a new West-to-East tidal wave sweeping across the region.’

Europe saw over seven million new cases of Covid-19 in the first week of 2022, more than doubling in two weeks.

Dr Catherine Smallwood, from WHO’s Europe branch, said: ‘We still have a huge amount of uncertainty, we still have a virus that’s evolving quite quickly and posing quite new challenges.

‘We’re certainly not to the point of being able to call it endemic. It may become endemic in due course, but pinning that down to 2022 is a little bit difficult at this stage.’ It came as other European nations continued to struggle with increasing cases.

Italy reported a record 220,532 new cases yesterday, versus 101,762 the day before, its health ministry said. The country’s daily total coronavirus-related deaths rose to 294 from 227.

France also reported a record number of daily cases with 368,149 new cases reported yesterday.