SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

(AL JAZEERA) — The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) has warned against treat­ing COVID-19 as an en­dem­ic ill­ness like flu, rather than as a pan­dem­ic, say­ing the spread of the Omi­cron vari­ant has not yet sta­bilised.

Spain’s Prime Min­is­ter Pe­dro Sanchez said on Mon­day it may be time to change how it tracks COVID-19’s evo­lu­tion to in­stead use a method sim­i­lar to how it fol­lows the flu, be­cause its lethal­i­ty has fall­en. That would im­ply treat­ing the virus as an “en­dem­ic ill­ness”, rather than a pan­dem­ic.

“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,” WHO’s se­nior emer­gency of­fi­cer for Eu­rope, Cather­ine Small­wood, told a press brief­ing.

Mean­while, Hans Kluge, the WHO’s top Eu­rope of­fi­cial, has pre­dict­ed that more than half of the con­ti­nent’s pop­u­la­tion will get in­fect­ed with the Omi­cron coro­n­avirus vari­ant with­in the next six to eight weeks.

Eu­rope saw more than sev­en mil­lion new­ly re­port­ed COVID-19 cas­es in the first week of 2022, more than dou­bling over a two-week pe­ri­od, Kluge, the WHO’s Eu­rope di­rec­tor, told a news brief­ing.

“At this rate, the In­sti­tute for Health Met­rics and Eval­u­a­tion fore­casts that more than 50 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion in the re­gion will be in­fect­ed with Omi­cron in the next 6-8 weeks,” Kluge said.