Daily reports of new coronavirus cases are increasing in 18 European countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Italy, because the authorities are relaxing pandemic restrictions too quickly, a senior World Health Organization official in the region said on Tuesday.
The official — Dr. Hans Kluge, the organization’s regional director for Europe — said the increase in new cases was linked to the recent spread of the highly transmissible Omicron subvariant known as BA.2.
Rather than take a gradual, measured approach, Dr. Kluge said, the 18 countries “are lifting those restrictions brutally, from too much to too few.”
Dr. Kluge noted that mortality from Covid-19 was still declining in the 18 countries. Even so, he said, the virus remains a deadly threat across the W.H.O.’s 53-country Europe region, which also includes Israel and all of the former Soviet Union. Some 20,000 deaths related to the coronavirus were reported in the region last week, he said.
Countries will have to get used to the virus remaining in circulation at some level indefinitely, “but it does not mean that we cannot get rid of the pandemic,” Dr. Kluge said at a news conference. He spoke in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, where he met health officials who are dealing with refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
To bring the virus under control, he said, countries in Europe should protect people who are especially vulnerable to the virus; strengthen their health surveillance measures to detect new variants; make use of antiviral medicines that can drastically reduce the severity of the disease; and take care of “long Covid” patients whose symptoms linger for weeks or months.
