The omicron variant of COVID-19 is on track to infect more than half of Europeans, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday, but added that it should not be viewed as a flu-like endemic illness just yet.
Europe saw more than 7 million newly reported cases in the first week of 2022, more than doubling over a two-week period, the WHO's Europe director Hans Kluge told a news briefing.
"At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecasts that more than 50% of the population in the region will be infected with omicron in the next 6-8 weeks," Kluge said, referring to a research center at the University of Washington. Fifty out of 53 countries in Europe and central Asia have logged cases of the more infectious variant, Kluge said.
Evidence, however, is emerging that omicron is affecting the upper respiratory tract more than the lungs, causing milder symptoms than previous variants. But the WHO has cautioned more studies are still needed to prove this.
Kluge said the impact of the omicron strain will be devastating in countries where vaccination rates are lower. He also said he was "deeply concerned" about omicron as it moves east, warning: "we have yet to see its full impact in countries where levels of vaccination uptake are lower, and where we will see more severe disease in the unvaccinated." Kluge made an example of Denmark, where cases of disease linked to omicron had "exploded in recent weeks" and the rate of hospitalizations during the Christmas holidays among unvaccinated people had been six times higher than those who received two vaccines.
"Where the omicron surge has begun, the priority should be to avoid and reduce harm among the vulnerable, and minimise disruption to health systems and essential services," Kluge said. "This means prioritising vulnerable people for primary course and booster doses, advising them to avoid closed, crowded spaces, and offering the possibility to work remotely wherever possible until the infection surge passes."
On Monday, Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it may be time to change how it tracks COVID-19's evolution and instead implement a method similar to the one used with the flu given that its lethality has fallen.
That would imply treating the virus as an endemic illness, rather than a pandemic, without recording every case and without testing all people presenting symptoms. But that is "a way off," the WHO's senior emergency officer for Europe, Catherine Smallwood, said at the briefing, adding that endemicity requires stable and predictable transmission.
"We still have a huge amount of uncertainty and a virus that is evolving quite quickly, imposing new challenges. We are certainly not at the point where we are able to call it endemic," Smallwood said. "It may become endemic in due course, but pinning that down to 2022 is a little bit difficult at this stage."