The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 25 January 2022
by Mike Evans
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
Abraham Lincoln
In this report we are looking at what the WHO is saying about the pandemic, and we are also looking at the latest figures around the world which show some disturbing facts about the situation here in Portugal.
First though to the World Health Organisation and the latest words to come from the chief of the organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In an address to the UN health agency’s executive board, he said that the world can end the Covid-19 emergency this year.
“We can end Covid-19 as a global health emergency and we can do it this year,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the UN health agency’s executive board. 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 virus last week killed someone every 12 seconds, he said.
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 end-2021 and 85% of people in Africa were yet to receive a single jab, Dr 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, Dr 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 Dr 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. “We will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated strategy for acute respiratory diseases,” he said, emphasising 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.”
While Dr. Tedros was talking on a global basis another WHO executive, Hans Kluge, the World Health Organisation’s Europe director was quoted as saying that in Europe, “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” Hans Kluge said in an interview, adding that Omicron could infect 60% of Europeans by March.
Once the current surge of Omicron currently sweeping across Europe subsides, “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity, either thanks to the vaccine or because people have immunity due to the infection, and also lowering seasonality.”
“So, we anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back,” Mr Kluge said.
The Omicron variant, which studies have shown generally leads to less severe infection among vaccinated people than Delta, has raised long-awaited hopes that Covid-19 is starting to shift from a pandemic to a more manageable endemic illness like seasonal flu.
“There is a lot of talk about endemic but endemic means … that it is possible to predict what’s going to happen. This virus has surprised (us) more than once so we have to be very careful,” Mr Kluge said.
In the WHO Europe region, which comprises 53 countries including several in Central Asia, Omicron represented 15% of new cases as of 18 January, compared to 6.3% a week earlier, the health body said.
The idea that the pandemic is coming to an end will be good news to many especially in those countries in Europe where there have been severe lockdowns in the past few weeks. Over the weekend thousands of demonstrators have marched through Brussels in Belgium to protest anti-coronavirus rules as the Omicron wave causes infections to reach record highs.
Protesters carried signs slamming Belgium Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and the Covid Safe pass proving you are vaccinated or have tested negative that is required for entry into numerous venues. Belgium has seen daily infections surge to over 60,000 in the past week in what authorities have called a “tsunami”.
However, the milder variant and high rate of vaccination – including people getting a third booster jab – means that health systems have not come under the same strain as during earlier waves.
On Friday Mr De Croo announced that restaurants and bars could extend their opening hours – although nightclubs remain closed.
Neighbouring France has said it will begin a gradual lifting of Covid restrictions from 2 February after authorities said there were “encouraging signs” that the wave of infections due to the Omicron variant is ebbing.
Meanwhile the EMA, European Medical Agency has warned of a new threat to citizens’ health away from Covid 19. Influenza has returned to Europe at a faster-than-expected rate this winter after almost disappearing last year, raising concerns about a prolonged “twindemic” with Covid-19 amid some doubts about the effectiveness of flu vaccines.
Lockdowns, mask-wearing and social distancing that have become the norm in Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic knocked out flu last winter, temporarily eradicating a virus that globally kills about 650,000 a year, according to EU figures.
But that has now changed as countries adopt less strict measures to fight Covid-19 due to widespread vaccination. Since mid-December, flu viruses have been circulating in Europe at a higher-than-expected rate, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) reported this month.
In December, the number of flu cases in European intensive care units rose steadily to a peak of 43 in the last week of the year, ECDC and World Health Organisation data show. That is well below pre-pandemic levels – with weekly flu cases in ICUs peaking at over 400 at the same stage in 2018, for example. But it is a big increase on last year, when there was only one flu case in an ICU in the whole of December, data shows.
The return of the virus could be the start of an unusually long flu season that could stretch well into the summer, the ECDC’s top expert on influenza Pasi Penttinen said. “If we start to lift all measures, the big concern I have for influenza is that, because we have had such a long time of almost no circulation in the European population, maybe we will shift away from normal seasonal patterns,” he added.
Mr Penttinen said dismantling restrictive measures in the spring could prolong the circulation of flu far beyond the normal end of the European season in May. A “twindemic” could put excessive pressure on already overstretched health systems, the ECDC said in its report.
I am sure many of you will have been looking at the daily figures of new infections for Portugal with a feeling of trepidation and wonder if this is the start of another wave of infections which will mean further restrictions. Looking at data supplied by Worldometer.info for the past week up to 23/1 and we see that the trends of new cases have been rising in Europe by 15%, by 27% in Asia, and 33% in South America. In the other continents the trend is one of a lowering of cases compared to the previous week.
However, when we look at Europe and in particular Portugal the rise in new infections in the past week has been the fifth highest in the world. This is based on countries with more than 1 million in population and is the 7-day figure per 1 million of population. Denmark, France, Israel, and Slovenia are the countries with higher rates than Portugal. Denmark has a rate of 42,872 new cases per million, France has 38,475 cases, Israel has 37,171 and Slovenia has 33,790 cases per million of population. Portugal’s rate for the week was 33,186.
Whilst deaths in Portugal rose by 40% compared to the previous 7 days, the rate per 1 million of population is markedly lower than many other countries in the world. Portugal’s rate was 20 deaths per 1 million of population. Bulgaria remains the country with the highest death toll per million of population in the world, again based on countries with 1 million or more citizens at 86.
While this report may show there are mixed messages it is obvious that the virus is far from being beaten so we must all remain on our guard and do all we can to keep the spread of the virus down.
Until the next time Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 352,512,362
Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,616,243
Total Recovered Worldwide – 280,362,089
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 66,534,030 (18.8% of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 285,978,332
Information and Resources:
https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2022/0117/1274079-return-of-flu/