CHISINAU — Several European countries, including Germany,
France, Italy and Britain, lifted their
COVID-19 curbs too “brutally” and are
now seeing a rise in cases likely due to the more transmissible BA2 variant,
the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
اضافة اعلان
WHO Europe director Hans Kluge told a press
conference in Moldova that he was “optimistic but vigilant” about the
pandemic’s development in Europe.
COVID-19 is on the rise in 18 out of 53 countries in
the
WHO European region, he said.
“The countries where we see a particular increase
are the UK, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, France, Italy, and Germany”.
He said the main reason behind the increase was
likely the BA2 variant, which experts say is about 30 percent more contagious,
but not more dangerous, than its predecessor BA1.
But in addition, “those countries are lifting the
restrictions brutally from too much to too few,” he said.
According to the
WHO database, the number of new COVID-19 cases in Europe fell sharply after a
peak at the end of January, but has been on the rise again since early March.
Over the past seven days, more than 5.1 million new
cases and 12,496 deaths have been reported in the WHO’s European region.
That brings the number of cases since the start of
the pandemic to almost 194.4 million and the number of deaths to more than 1.92
million.
Kluge said Europe was nonetheless relatively well
set to cope with the virus now.
“There is a very large capital of immunity ...
either thanks to the vaccination or due to the infection.”
In addition, “winter is finishing so people will
gather less in small, crowded places, and thirdly, we know that
Omicron is
milder in fully vaccinated people including a booster”, he said.
However, he recalled that “in countries with a low
vaccination rate it’s still a disease which kills.”
Kluge said the world “will have to live with
“COVID”for quite a time, but that does not mean that we cannot get rid of the
pandemic.”
In order to do so, he said countries needed to
protect the vulnerable, strengthen their surveillance and genomic sequencing,
and get access to new antiviral medicines.
Finally, he said countries
needed to take care of ‘post-COVID’ sufferers and the backlog of medical care
that has arisen during the pandemic.
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