the variant covid 19 omicron is expanding in Europe to the east of the continent, where in the last two weeks the number of new infections has doubled and there is a lower level of vaccination, the European office of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday.
“In the last two weeks, Covid-19 cases have more than doubled in six countries in this part of the region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Russian Federation and Ukraine). As anticipated, the wave of ómicron is moving east: 10 eastern member states have already detected this variant,” said the organization’s European director, Hans Kluge.
In a statement presented at a virtual meeting with media from those countries, Kluge recalled that “The vaccination remains our best defense against severe disease and death for all currently circulating COVID-19 virus variants.”
lack of protection
“Yet too many people at higher risk remain unprotected: fewer than 40% of people over 60 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan have completed their COVID-19 vaccination series,” he recalled. Kluge.
And he added that Bulgaria, Georgia and North Macedonia are also among the countries where less than 40% of health workers have received at least one dose of the covid-19 vaccine.
“I call on governments, health authorities and relevant partners to closely examine the local reasons behind lower vaccine demand and uptake, and design tailored interventions to increase vaccination rates urgently, based on context-specific evidence,” the senior official added.
Kluge said that in the European region of the WHO there have been “more than 165 million cases of covid-19 to date. This is still one deadly disease1.8 million people have lost their lives, 25,000 in the last week”.
sanitary pressure
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He added that “health systems are under increasing pressure, especially as cases among health workers are rising, from 30,000 at the end of last year to 50,000 a month later“.
And he finally warned that “as health needs increase, the number of personnel available to provide care has decreased and the risk of transmission in health care settings has increased, further aggravating the problem.”