Do not Politicise OMICRON warns the WHO

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer

February 9, 2022 – It has been almost five weeks since the Omicron variant was reported in South Africa for the first time. Since then, we have had 90 million new COVID infections. To give you some perspective, that’s more cases than were recorded in the entire year of 2020.

MSN reports that as countries in Europe like Denmark, France, and England, WHO Chief Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus is saying slow down.

“We are concerned that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines — and because of omicron’s high transmissibility and lower severity — preventing transmission is no longer possible and no longer necessary,” he said at a recent COVID19 briefing.

The chief added that nothing was further from the truth and it was premature for any country to declare victory or give up on COVID.

The WHO says four of its six global regions are seeing an increase in deaths, this includes the Caribbean region, where at one point during the past 10 weeks deaths rose over 30 per cent.

“Every country has to find its feet, know where it is, know where it wants to go, and chart its path … You can look at what other countries are doing. But please don’t just follow blindly what every other country is doing,” said WHO Emergencies Chief, Dr. Michael Ryan.

He warned that while countries with higher vaccination rates have more choices when it comes to easing restrictions they should assess certain factors like their current epidemiology, at-risk populations, immunity in the population, and access to health care tools to fight the pandemic.

At the same time, the omicron sub-variant, BA2, also called ‘stealth omicron’, has been found in at least 30 US states including California, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington. What is concerning about BA2 is that it appears to be more transmissible than the BA1 subtype, but this has not yet been confirmed.

In the midst of this, the South African government has decided that asymptomatic people who are positive with Covid-19 will no longer have to isolate, vaccinated or not, and contacts of positives no longer have to isolate. South Africa’s policy is considered to be extreme, given the country’s low vaccination rate.

Despite still high numbers of hospitalization across the country, Canada has begun to loosen COVID-19 restrictions allowing residents to dine indoors at restaurants and access movie theaters, gyms, and museums – all services that were closed or reduced after the emergence of omicron, but they will only be accessible at half capacity

Ryan said he was concerned that, “political pressure will result in people in some countries opening prematurely and that will result in unnecessary transmission, unnecessary severe disease and unnecessary death.”