Once the current Omicron wave is over in Europe, the pandemic situation could be over in the region even as the virus may come back by the end of this year, World Health Organisation’s (WHOs) Europe director Hans Kluge has said.

In an interview with news agency Agence France-Presse, Hans Kluge said the Omicron variant of coronavirus could infect 60 per cent of Europeans by March.

“It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” AFP quoted Kluge as saying.

Once the current Omicron surge is over, Kluge said “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity, either thanks to the vaccine or because people have immunity due to the infection, and also lower seasonality”.

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“We anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back,” Kluge said.

What do other health experts say?

The US government’s Chief Medical Advisor Dr Anthony Fauci has expressed similar optimism. With Covid-19 cases coming down sharply in some parts of the US, there might be a turnaround throughout the entire country soon, Fauci said on the ABC News talk show “This Week”.

The WHO regional office for Africa has also said that deaths were declining in the region for the first time since the fourth wave dominated by the Omicron variant hit.

‘Too early to predict Covid-19 as endemic’

While the dominance of Omicron, which leads to less severe infection among vaccinated people, has encouraged scientists to see a shift in the pandemic situation, Kluge cautioned that it was still too early to consider Covid-19 endemic.

“There is a lot of talk about endemic but endemic means…that it is possible to predict what’s going to happen. This virus has surprised (us) more than once, so we have to be very careful,” AFP quoted Kluge as saying.

He also said that with Omicron spreading so widely, other variants could still emerge.

According to European Union health agency ECDC, Omicron is now the dominant variant in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA, or Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). As of January 18, the Omicron variant was found in 15 per cent of the cases in the WHO’s Europe region, which comprises 53 countries. Omicron variant was found in 6.3 per cent of the cases in the region a week earlier.

Kluge said the priority was to stabilise the situation in Europe, where vaccination levels range across countries from 25 to 95 per cent of the population, leading to varying degrees of strain on hospitals and health-care systems.

“Stabilising means that the health system is no longer overwhelmed due to Covid-19 and can continue with the essential health services, which have unfortunately been really disrupted for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and routine immunisation,” he said.

(With inputs from AFP)

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