The European Union Commissioner for Health and Food Safety said on Monday that the bloc’s countries must start preparing now for a new wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the fall and winter, noting a “alarming increase” in outbreaks.
Commissioner Stella Kyriakides also warned that the pandemic was not over yet, telling “Radio Cyprus”: “Unfortunately, there has been an alarming increase in cases in several countries.”
And she continued, “For the past two months, we have been preparing for the fall and winter, fully aware that the next pandemic wave cannot and should not burden our economies or societies, especially at a time when they are already affected by the war, the invasion of Ukraine and inflation.”
Kyriakides, who is Cypriot, said that the commission had asked member states to speed up the pace of giving booster doses of vaccines to people over the age of 60 and to groups at risk.
She said: “These months must be preparatory…so that our health systems are ready for possible new waves that may be associated, for example, with seasonal influenza.”
The epidemiologist and technical officer in charge of combating Covid-19 at the World Health Organization, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, announced that there has been an increase in the detection of cases of Omicron infection around the world, stressing that more than 5.7 million cases were reported to the World Health Organization last week, and that These are the cases where data has been found, which is a smaller number of cases on the ground, because worldwide surveillance activities, including analyzes and testing, have fallen dramatically.
Dr. Maria said that there are many subspecies of the omicron variant, and they are classified as omicron and all are listed as variants of concern, explaining that the WHO specifically tracks the BA.4, BA.5 and BA.2.75 variants.