A leading World Health Organisation official said on Tuesday, January 11, that on present trends more than half of European residents will have been infected by the Omicron variant of coronavirus within two months. Needless to say, if this were to happen it would have enormous repercussions.
Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said the process will take between six and eight weeks.
He said there is a tidal way moving from west to east across Europe. Fewer people have been vaccinated in central and eastern Europe, and so the implications are enormous in terms of pressure on hospitals and eventual death rates.
If his predictions come to pass, increasingly mass testing will be a fool’s errand, a not very useful sideshow to the main event, in which vaccination is the star player.
FILE PHOTO: Dr Hans Kluge Reuters