The UN health agency says the num­ber of new dai­ly COVID-19 cas­es more than dou­bled in six coun­tries in the re­gion in two weeks

SOURCE: Al Jazeera

A new wave of COVID in­fec­tions from the high­ly trans­mis­si­ble Omi­cron vari­ant of the coro­n­avirus is head­ing to­wards East­ern Eu­rope, the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) has warned.

The WHO’s Eu­ro­pean of­fice on Mon­day called for au­thor­i­ties to boost vac­ci­na­tion ef­forts in the re­gion, warn­ing that a “tidal wave” of in­fec­tions was ap­proach­ing.

WHO Eu­rope di­rec­tor, Hans Kluge, said the num­ber of new dai­ly COVID-19 cas­es had more than dou­bled in six coun­tries in the re­gion in the past two weeks.

Kluge said the 53-coun­try re­gion has tal­lied more than 165 mil­lion con­firmed coro­n­avirus cas­es and 1.8 mil­lion deaths linked to the pan­dem­ic – in­clud­ing 25,000 in the last week alone.

“To­day, our fo­cus is to­wards the east of the WHO Eu­ro­pean re­gion,” Kluge said in Russ­ian at a me­dia brief­ing, point­ing to a surge of Omi­cron cas­es. “Over the past two weeks, cas­es of COVID-19 have more than dou­bled in six coun­tries in this part of the re­gion [Ar­me­nia, Azer­bai­jan, Be­larus, Geor­gia, the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, and Ukraine],” the di­rec­tor said.

“As an­tic­i­pat­ed, the Omi­cron wave is mov­ing east: 10 east­ern mem­ber states have now de­tect­ed this vari­ant,” he added.

Low vac­ci­na­tion rates

Kluge not­ed vac­cine up­take was still rel­a­tive­ly low in parts of the re­gion.

Less than 40 per­cent of those aged above 60 have com­plet­ed their COVID-19 vac­cine se­ries in Bosnia and Herze­gov­ina, Bul­gar­ia, Kyr­gyzs­tan, Ukraine and Uzbek­istan.

He added that in Bul­gar­ia, Geor­gia and North Mace­do­nia, less than 40 per­cent of health­care work­ers had re­ceived at least one dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine.

“I call on gov­ern­ments, health au­thor­i­ties and rel­e­vant part­ners to close­ly ex­am­ine the lo­cal rea­sons in­flu­enc­ing low­er vac­cine de­mand and ac­cep­tance, and de­vise tai­lored in­ter­ven­tions to in­crease vac­ci­na­tion rates ur­gent­ly, based on the con­text-spe­cif­ic ev­i­dence,” Kluge said.

He stressed that in the face of an “Omi­cron tidal wave”, and “with Delta still cir­cu­lat­ing wide­ly in the east”, now was “not the mo­ment to lift mea­sures that we know work in re­duc­ing the spread of COVID-19”.

These mea­sures in­clude avoid­ing crowd­ed lo­ca­tions, wear­ing masks in­doors, im­prov­ing ven­ti­la­tion and us­ing rapid tests to iden­ti­fy cas­es ear­ly, Kluge added.