Conditions ideal for more transmissible, dangerous variants but…: WHO chief's latest Covid alert

The chief of the World Health Organisation has warned that current conditions are ideal for the emergence of more transmissible and more dangerous variants of coronavirus.

The coronavirus pandemic will end "when we choose to end it" even though the conditions are now "ideal for more transmissible, more dangerous variants"of the virus to emerge, World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a Live session at the Munich Security Conference 2022, currently underway in the German city. Ending the pandemic "must be the focus"of the world, he stressed.

Offering his assessment of the pandemic that has exploded, receded, and exploded again, Ghebreyesus said, "I'm sure when we met two years ago, when we were all coming to grips with the spread of this new virus, that none of us would have imagined we would now be entering the third year of the pandemic."

"In fact, the conditions are ideal for more transmissible, more dangerous variants to emerge. But we can end the Covid pandemic as a global health emergency this year," he cautioned.

The lower severity of the Omicron variant combined with high vaccine coverage in some countries is "driving a dangerous narrative that the pandemic is over", the WHO chief warned.

"But it's not."

"Not when 70,000 people a week are dying from a preventable and treatable disease. Not when 83% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. Not when health systems continue to strain and crack under the caseload. Not when we have a highly transmissible virus circulating almost unchecked, with too little surveillance to track its evolution," he said.

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