close
Thursday March 28, 2024

Hong Kong’s top scientists urge shift from zero-Covid: Several European countries lifted Covid measures too brutally: WHO

By AFP
March 23, 2022

Chisinau: Several European countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Britain, lifted their Covid curbs too "brutally" and are now seeing a rise in cases likely due to the more transmissible BA2 variant, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

WHO Europe director Hans Kluge told a press conference in Moldova that he was "optimistic but vigilant" about the pandemic’s development in Europe.

Covid is on the rise in 18 out of 53 countries in the WHO European region, he said.

"The countries where we see a particular increase are the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, France, Italy and Germany".

He said the main reason behind the increase was likely the BA2 variant, which experts say is about 30 percent more contagious, but not more dangerous, than its predecessor BA1.

But in addition, "those countries are lifting the restrictions brutally from too much to too few," he said.

According to the WHO database, the number of new Covid cases in Europe fell sharply after a peak at the end of January, but has been on the rise again since early March.

Over the past seven days, more than 5.1 million new cases and 12,496 deaths have been reported in the WHO’s European region.

That brings the number of cases since the start of the pandemic to almost 194.4 million and the number of deaths to more than 1.92 million.

Kluge said Europe was nonetheless relatively well set to cope with the virus now.

"There is a very large capital of immunity ... either thanks to the vaccination or due to the infection."

In addition, "winter is finishing so people will gather less in small, crowded places, and thirdly, we know that Omicron is milder in fully vaccinated people including a booster", he said.

However, he recalled that "in countries with a low vaccination rate it’s still a disease which kills."

Kluge said the world "will have to live with" Covid "for quite a time, but that does not mean that we cannot get rid of the pandemic."

In order to do so, he said countries needed to protect the vulnerable, strengthen their surveillance and genomic sequencing, and get access to new antiviral medicines.

Finally, he said countries needed to take care of ‘post-covid’ sufferers and the backlog of medical care that has arisen during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s top scientists urged the government on Tuesday to transition from China’s zero-Covid strategy before the next outbreak unless the financial hub wants to be a "closed port forever".

Hong Kong used strict travel curbs to keep the virus at bay for two years but these left Asia’s world city increasingly isolated and a deadly Omicron outbreak since January has led to an exodus of residents and businesses fleeing its mounting list of restrictions.

The massive surge in cases has ravaged the city’s healthcare system and left it with one of the highest Covid-19 fatality rates in the developed world, with the government facing criticism for failing to vaccinate its elderly population in time.

On Monday, Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam announced easing travel restrictions in April, but the government did not provide a comprehensive roadmap out of the crisis beyond reducing quarantine periods for inbound travellers and opening flight paths.

"The past two months were a very painful experience of loss for us and it does not allow us to wait," top epidemiologist Gabriel Leung, who leads a team of scientists working on the virus, told reporters on Tuesday.

Scientists estimate that around 4.4 million people in densely populated Hong Kong -- or 60 percent of the population -- have been infected so far during the Omicron wave.

Official figures have clocked over a million cases and nearly 6,000 deaths since January -- primarily among the unvaccinated elderly population.

Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong’s medical school and a government expert frequently cited by Lam, stressed the importance of getting vaccinated and boosted while saying Hong Kong must begin living with the virus unless it "remains a closed port forever."

He added that endemicity is the "safest road because we do not know if the next new variant is weaker or stronger than those we have seen".

In line with China, where a zero-Covid strategy has seen snap lockdowns imposed on millions of residents after even a handful of cases are detected, Hong Kong has maintained some of the world’s toughest pandemic restrictions.