The highly transmissible Omicron strain has
spread unabated around the world, pushing some governments to impose fresh
measures while speeding up the rollout of vaccine booster shots.
“This pandemic is nowhere near over,” WHO
chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Tuesday from the agency’s
headquarters in Geneva.
Europe is at the epicentre of alarming new
outbreaks, with Germany’s cases soaring past 100,000 and France reporting
nearly half a million cases on Tuesday.
The UN health chief warned against
dismissing Omicron as mild, as the dominant Covid strain continues to flare new
outbreaks from Latin America to East Asia after it was first detected in
southern Africa in November.
“Omicron may be less severe, on average,
but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading,” he said.
European surge
Five million cases were reported in Europe
last week and the WHO has predicted Omicron could infect half of all Europeans
by March, filling hospitals across the continent.
Germany on Tuesday recorded 112,323
coronavirus cases and 239 deaths, officials said, with Omicron found in more
than 70 per cent of the infections.
The surge has pushed German Chancellor Olaf
Scholz to seek compulsory vaccinations to ramp up the immunity of the
population in Europe’s biggest economy.
Other European countries are also battling
soaring Omicron rates, with neighbouring France recently averaging around
300,000 cases daily.
The latest data issued by Public Health
France showed that there were 464,769 new cases in the last 24-hour period, a
record number.
The record cases come days after the
two-year anniversary of the announcement of the first person dying of a virus
in China only later identified as COVID.
Since January 11, 2020, known fatalities in
the pandemic have soared to more than 5.5 million.
Hopes for Europe’s tourism recovery remain
bleak with the World Tourism Organization saying Tuesday that foreign arrivals
will not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024 at the earliest, despite a
rise of 19 per cent last year compared to 2020.
‘Quasi-emergency’
Elsewhere in the world, Brazil registered a
new record number of daily cases of more than 137,000 on Tuesday.
The country suffered a devastating second
wave last year with deaths topping 4,000 a day, pushing its death toll to the
second-highest in the world behind the United States.
President Jair Bolsonaro, an avowed vaccine
sceptic who has downplayed Omicron, is increasingly under fire for his handling
of the pandemic, and he is on course to lose the country’s October presidential
election, according to polls.
In Asia, Japan was set to tighten
restrictions across the country, including Tokyo, as it battles record
infections fuelled by Omicron while China partially relaxed transport
restrictions in the megacity of Xi’an where millions have been confined to
their homes for weeks.
Japanese experts on Wednesday backed
placing 13 regions “under quasi-emergency measures from January 21 to February
13” the minister in charge of coronavirus affairs, Daishiro Yamagiwa, told
reporters.
China’s resumption of some inter-city train
routes in Xi’an from Tuesday comes just before the Lunar New Year holiday later
this month, traditionally a period of mass travel.
It also comes as Beijing battles multiple
clusters that are testing its enforcement of a strict “zero-COVID” approach
ahead of next month’s Winter Olympics.