The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that Europe will register this boreal summer “high levels” of Covid-19 due to the withdrawal of restrictions and asked to closely monitor the virus, after multiplying by three the number of infections in the last month.
“As countries across Europe lifted the social measures that were in place, the virus will circulate at high levels during the summer,” said the director of the UN health agency for Europe, Hans Kluge.
“The virus will not disappear just because countries stop monitoring it. It continues to infect, it continues to change and it continues to kill,” he stressed in a written statement reproduced by the AFP news agency.
Due to the BA.5 subvariant of Ómicron, the number of infections registered in the 53 countries of WHO Europe approached 500,000 daily this week. At the end of May it was at 150,000, according to data from the organization.
The death toll instead remains at a low level, with about 500 deaths per day, a level reached in the summer of 2020. During part of the winter, the death toll reached 4,000-5,000 per day.
Almost all European countries register a rise in infections.
“We hope that the extensive vaccination programs that most member states have in place, as well as previous infections, will mean that we will avoid the more serious consequences that we saw early in the pandemic,” Kluge said.
“However, our recommendations remain in force,” he added.
Kluge also stressed the importance of continuing to monitor the virus. Otherwise, it “makes us increasingly blind regarding the ways of contagion and (its) evolution,” the expert stressed.
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