Citate: Question,ANSWER
PU Hi. Good evening. I’m Pranay Upadhyaya, from ABP News, and thank you for taking my question. It’s been over three years of the pandemic, COVID-19, and what is the WHO’s assessment about the course of this pandemic? And if you can share some details be in the south and South-East Asia region there has been an increase in COVID-19 infections.
The government of India specifically has taken a review about the situation. What is the WHO’s assessment about this multi fold increase because last week WHO’s assessment says that there as been an over 55% increase in COVID-19 infections?
CL Thank you. Dr Van Kerkhove, please.
MK Thanks for the question and raising a question specifically on COVID-19. At the present time, we’re still in a public health emergency of international concern at a global level as well as still in a pandemic. The virus is circulating. We are in a much better situation than we were since the beginning of this pandemic. While we still see a lot of circulation of the virus, we are not seeing the same level of impact, and by impact we mean there’s a reduced incidence of hospitalisation, ICU and death.
00:24:29
But the threat isn’t over. We still see between five, six, seven, 10,000 deaths per week and these are largely among individuals who are of older age, they may not have been vaccinated or received the full number of doses that are required for them at their age, so the threat remains. COVID-19 is also circulating in the context of influenza and other infectious pathogens, which still put a burden on health care systems.
One of the big uncertainties we face going forward is the virus itself. It hasn’t settled into a predictable pattern. It continues to evolve. Omicron is the variant of concern that remains dominant worldwide and there are more than 600 sublineages of Omicron that are in circulation and there is no one dominant variant in every country.
We will continue to see waves of infection. The peaks of those infections may not be as large as we saw before and likely will not be because we have population-level immunity that has increased around the world from vaccination and also from past infection. One of things we are very concerned about is the potential for the virus to change, to become not only more transmissible but more severe.
00:25:44
And so we have to remain vigilant. We have to have systems that are in place that have strong surveillance so that we can track variants, the known variants that are in circulation and detect new ones, so that we can have agile systems to scale up or scale down, the need for clinical care, making sure that we have good antivirals that are in use and given to patients who need them, when they need them, to prevent severe disease and really, critically, to focus on vaccinating those who are most at risk.
The targets of the at-risk population still remain 100% of the at-risk groups, over 60, people with underlying conditions, people with underlying medical conditions, as I just said. So, we have to remain vigilant. On the one hand, we’re in much better situation, on the other we can’t predict with absolute certainty how this pandemic will unfold, with the exception that this virus is here to stay.
One of the variants that we are looking at, and I think you specifically mentioned India, is a variant that we have under monitoring. This is the XBB.1.16. It’s actually very similar in profile to XBB.1.5. It has one additional mutational mutation in the spike protein which in lab studies shows increase infectivity, as well as potential increased pathogenicity. So, it’s one that we are monitoring and we’re monitoring it because it has potential changes that we need to keep a good eye out on.
00:27:06
At the present time there’s only about 800 sequences of XBB.1.16 from 22 countries. Most of the sequences are from India and in India XBB.1.16 has replaced the other variants that are in circulation. So, this is one to watch. It has been in circulation for a few months.
We haven’t seen a change in severity in individuals or in populations but that’s why we have these systems in place, systems to track the variants, global collaborations to assess transmissibility, immune escape, severity and the impact of any of our interventions including diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. So, we have to remain vigilant and we will continue to work with our Member States as we transition all of the pillars of the response because everything that we are doing for COVID-19 is pandemic preparedness for the future.
CL Thank you very much, Dr Van Kerkhove. Next question goes to Helen Branswell, from STAT News. Helen, please go ahead and unmute.
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