GENEVA – Top officials at the World Health Organization said that Europe has seen a more than 50 per cent jump in coronavirus cases in the last month, making it the epicenter of the pandemic despite an ample supply of vaccines.
“There may be plenty of vaccine available, but uptake of vaccine has not been equal,” WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said during a press briefing according to AP.
He called for European authorities to “close the gap” in vaccinations. However, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said countries that have immunized more than 40 per cent of their populations should stop and instead donate their doses to developing countries that have yet to offer their citizens a first dose.
“No more boosters should be administered except to immuno-compromised people,” Tedros said.
He called for vaccine-makers to prioritize supplying COVAX, the UN-backed effort to share doses globally; Pfizer has sold just 1 per cent of its supply to COVAX, Moderna had provided just 1 million doses to the developing world as of late October.
Still, despite poorer countries receiving fewer than 1 per cent of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines, cases in Africa and Southeast Asia fell by 9 per cent last week.
More than 60 countries have started giving booster doses to combat waning immunity before winter, when another COVID-19 wave is expected. In the United States, children ages 5 to 11 started getting COVID-19 shots this week after authorities decided the benefits outweighed the risks.
The director of WHO’s 53-country Europe region, Dr. Hans Kluge, said the rising COVID-19 case counts are of “grave concern.”
“Europe is back at the epicenter of the pandemic, where we were one year ago,” said Kluge from WHO’s Copenhagen offices. Wearing a mask – -unlike his colleagues in Geneva – Kluge warned that coronavirus hospitalization rates more than doubled in the last week and predicted that on that trajectory, the region could see another 500,000 pandemic deaths by February, he said.
WHO Europe says the region, which stretches as far east as the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, tallied nearly 1.8 million new weekly cases, an increase of about 6 per cent from the previous week, and 24,000 COVID-19 weekly deaths – a 12 per cent gain.
Kluge said the countries in the region were at “varying stages of vaccination rollout” and that regionwide an average of 47 per cent of people were fully vaccinated. Only eight countries had 70 per cent of their populations fully vaccinated.
The increase in Europe’s COVID-19 marks the fifth consecutive week cases have risen across the continent, making it the only world region where COVID-19 is still increasing. The infection rate was by far the highest in Europe, which reported some 192 new cases per 100,000 people.
“We are clearly in another wave,” Sweden´s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said. “The increased spread is entirely concentrated in Europe.”
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