Covid-19 ‘could end in a year’

THE head of the World Health Organization said this week that the planet can end the Covid-19 emergency this year, although the virus last week killed someone every 12 seconds.

“We can end Covid-19 as a global health emergency and we can do it this year,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – who is all but guaranteed a second term after a procedural vote yesterday made him the sole nominee ahead of a leadership vote in May.

To do so, countries need to work harder to ensure equitable access to vaccines and treatment, track the virus and its emerging variants, and keep restrictions in place, he warned.

The WHO has for months demanded that countries do more to accelerate the distribution of vaccines in poorer nations, calling on all countries to vaccinate at least 70% of their populations by the middle of this year.

Half of the WHO’s 194 member states missed the previous target of vaccinating 40% of their people by end2021 and 85% of people in Africa were yet to receive a single jab, Tedros said.

“We simply cannot end the emergency phase of the pandemic unless we bridge this gap,” he said. “On average last week, 100 cases were reported every three seconds, and somebody lost their life to Covid-19 every 12 seconds,” he added.

Covid-19 has killed more than 5.5 million people since it first emerged in late 2019 and case numbers have been driven to record levels by the new Omicron variant.

Since the strain was first detected in southern Africa nine weeks ago, Tedros said 80 million cases had been reported to the WHO, more than in all of 2020.

Omicron appears to cause less severe disease than previous variants and Tedros confirmed that “the explosion in cases has not been matched by a surge in deaths”. The WHO chief said the world would need to learn to live with Covid-19.

“We will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated strategy for acute respiratory diseases,” he said, emphasising that it was “dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant, or that this is the end game.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “globally the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge. The potential for a more transmissible, more deadly variant remains very real.”

Meanwhile, as a new version of the highly contagious Omicron variant of the Covid-19 spreads in parts of Asia and Europe, the World Health Organization has recommended that officials investigate its characteristics to determine whether it poses new challenges for pandemic-weary nations.

Known as BA.2, the new version of the virus is a descendant of the Omicron variant responsible for huge surges of Covid-19 around the globe. Virologists are referring to the original Omicron variant as BA.1.

“The BA.2 descendant lineage, which differs from BA.1 in some of the mutations, including in the spike protein, is increasing in many countries,” the WHO wrote on its website. “Investigations into the characteristics of BA.2, including immune escape properties and virulence, should be prioritised independently (and comparatively) to BA.1.”

Viruses mutate constantly, mostly in harmless ways. There is no current evidence that BA.2 is more virulent, spreads faster or escapes immunity better than BA.1.

“Variants have come, variants have gone,” said Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University School of Medicine. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think this one is a whole lot worse than the current version of Omicron.”

BA.2 has been detected in India, Denmark and Britain, among other countries. In Europe, it appears the most widespread in Denmark, but that may be because the Scandinavian nation has a robust programme of sequencing the virus’s genome.

James Musser, the director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Human Infectious Diseases Research at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, which also is studying the genetic make-up of virus samples from its patients, said BA. 2 deserves close attention because little is known about it yet. “We know that Omicron … can clearly evade pre-existing immunity” from both vaccines and exposure to other variants of the virus, he said. “What we don’t know yet is whether son-of-Omicron does that better or worse than Omicron.”

This week, more than 695 000 new Covid-19 infections were reported in the US and testing shows that almost all are from Omicron.

Still, that total is down 13.7% from the week before, according to a seven-day average of data.

Anders Fomsgaard a virologist at the State Serum Institute in Denmark, said that BA.2 has become the dominant form of the virus in his nation of nearly 6 million people, where it now accounts for about 65% of new cases as BA.1 is on the decline.

The Danish infection control agency, the State Serum Institute (SSI), has argued that the Scandinavian country will achieve so-called population immunity against Covid-19 within the next few weeks. Barely a year ago, the SSI said that the then-dominant Delta variant had killed the hope of herd immunity “once and for all”.

According to Danish medical experts, Denmark is seeing a record Covid-19 spread since the start of the pandemic, but also has extensive vaccine coverage. Immunity is expected to coincide with a marked decline in the spread of infection awaited during spring and summer following the current peak. At the same time, Denmark’s chief epidemiologist, Tyra Grove Krause, warned that population or herd immunity is not permanent.

The UK Health Security Agency identified more than 400 cases of BA.2 in the first 10 days of January and has designated BA.2 a “virus under investigation”.

It said BA.2 has been identified in 40 countries. Some scientists have dubbed BA.2 the “stealth Omicron” because it has genetic traits that make it more difficult to identify the Omicron form of the virus on PCR tests.