The World Health Organization (WHO) health experts on Tuesday said COVID-19 should be treated as a pandemic and not as a flu-like endemic illness. The global health body said the spread of the Omicron variant has not yet stabilized, reported CGTN Africa.
“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,” Catherine Smallwood, the WHO’s senior emergency officer for Europe, told a press briefing.
The WHO experts have also suggested that repeating booster doses of the original Covid vaccines is not a viable strategy against emerging variants. They called for new vaccines that can provide better protection against transmission.
WHO-led expert group created to assess the performance of Covid-19 vaccines said offering fresh booster shots of existing Covid vaccines for protection against new strains of the virus was not the best way to fight the pandemic.
“A vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable,” the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Composition (TAG-Co-VAC) said in a statement.
It said preliminary data suggests the existing vaccines were less effective at preventing symptomatic Covid disease in people who have contracted the new Omicron variant.
On Tuesday, Maria Van Kerkhove, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist and Covid-19 Technical Lead at the WHO, warned Omicron is quickly overtaking the Covid-19 Delta variant and becoming dominant around the world.
The global health agency has cautioned that there is increasing evidence that Omicron is able to evade immunity but has less disease severity as compared to other coronavirus variants.
Kerkhove said even though there is some information that Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, it’s not a mild disease as people are still being hospitalized for Omicron.
