The omicron variant of Covid-19 is on track to infect more than half of Europeans, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.
On Monday, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it may be time to change how it tracks Covid-19’s evolution to instead use a method similar to flu, because 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.Stephane Du Sakutin / AFP - Getty Images But that is “a way off," WHO’s senior emergency officer for Europe, Catherine Smallwood, said at the briefing, adding that endemicity requires a 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.”
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