The Covid-19 virus has not gone away and data from 84 countries show that confirmed cases have increased in recent weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, after recalling that at least 40 Olympic athletes have tested positive for the infectious disease in Paris.
“The perception is that Covid is gone, but that’s not the case. The more the virus circulates, the more you increase the chances of it changing and mutating and making it more severe,” said WHO’s director of Epidemic and Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness, Maria Van Kerkhove, in Geneva.
The expert, who led the WHO technical team dedicated to fighting Covid-19 during the pandemic, said her comments are not based on fears, but on scenarios based on data and science.
On the one hand, these data indicate that globally, the number of diagnostic tests that have yielded positive results has increased by 10% recently, with regional variations such as in Europe, where they have shot up by 20% in the middle of summer, resulting in an increase in hospitalizations and deaths.
However, results from wastewater analyses indicate that the circulation of the Covid-19 virus could be up to 20 times higher than what is being reported, Van Kerkhove said.
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Unlike other viruses that cause respiratory infections, whose circulation tends to increase during winter, Covid-19 spreads regardless of the weather and temperature, as shown by the cases detected among athletes participating in the Paris Olympics.
Van Kerkhove said that this is why the WHO is not ceasing its efforts to convince governments to continue investing in ways to understand how the virus circulates and to protect their populations, “so that we are ready for dramatic increases in cases of Covid or other emerging or re-emerging pathogens, such as avian flu, dengue or mpox.”
One of the key prevention measures is that, above all, risk groups (people over 60, chronically ill people and healthcare personnel) should be vaccinated if 12 months have passed since their last dose.
However, the organization acknowledges that there are certain supply problems because vaccine production has dropped in the last year due to companies doubting that there is still a market for them. EFE
