COVID-19 remains dangerous but with the right measures the emergency could end by 2023

Despite remarkable progress in the fight against the coronavirus, "the threat of COVID-19 persists," the director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned at a press conference on Wednesday, putting the weekly death toll from the disease at 10,000. "The real figure is likely to be much higher," he warned.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that "great inequalities in access to testing, treatment and vaccination" persist and "that, ultimately, COVID-19 remains a dangerous virus for our health, our economies and our societies as a whole".

The head of the UN health agency expressed concern about the current epidemiological picture of COVID-19, "with intense transmission in several parts of the world and a rapidly spreading recombinant subvariant".

Tedros explained that in recent weeks there have been increased reports of hospitalisations and increased pressure on health systems, especially in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, where respiratory diseases such as influenza are also circulating.

"There is no doubt that COVID-19 will continue to be a major topic of discussion, but I believe and hope that with the right efforts this will be the year when the public health emergency officially ends," he predicted. 

Following the large increase in cases and hospitalisations in China, Tedros confirmed that a high-level meeting between WHO staff and their counterparts in China took place last week, in addition to yesterday's meeting of the agency's Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 and clinical management expert network groups on the disease with Chinese experts.

Following these meetings, the WHO director continued to call on China to provide "more rapid, regular and reliable data on hospitalisations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive and real-time viral sequencing".

Dr Michael Ryan, WHO's director of health emergencies, said there are "problems in terms of the criteria for recording and reporting deaths attributable to COVID-19", which he said is "too narrowly defined".

The expert highlighted the difficulties experienced by all countries in recording hospital discharges, admissions and intensive care unit use, but noted that "we believe that the figures currently being published in China do not reflect the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions and, above all, in terms of deaths".

Because of the high rates of spread of the disease and the lack of data, Tedros said it was "understandable that some countries are taking measures that they believe will protect their own citizens". 

 Tedros also noted the increase in Europe and the United States, especially in the northeastern United States, of one of the omicron subvariants originally detected last October, XBB.1.5.

The organisation's senior epidemiologist, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, said the subvariant has so far been detected in 29 countries, but she did not rule out the possibility of it being found in more nations "as sequencing is becoming less and less available globally, so it is difficult for us to track each of these omicron subvariants".

Van Kerkhove explained that it is "the most transmissible subvariant that has been detected to date" and that "this is due to mutations (...) that allow it to attach to the cell and replicate easily".

The expert expressed her concern about the ease of growth of XBB.1.5, and indicated that "our concern is its transmissibility, it has the capacity for immune escape, as we have seen with X.BB, but it is one of several sub-variants of omicron that are in circulation and, the more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it will have to change. We expect new waves of infections worldwide, but that need not translate into new waves of deaths, as our countermeasures continue to work".

Finally, she said the agency's Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 is assessing the risks of the subvariant and expects to publish its risk assessment in the coming days.