year, the body’s technical lead for the coronavirus illness said Wednesday in a live question-and-answer session on social media.
Passengers should thus be advised to wear masks in high-risk settings such as long-haul flights, said the WHO’s senior emergency officer for Europe, Catherine Smallwood.“This should be a recommendation issued to passengers arriving from anywhere where there is widespread COVID-19 transmission,” Smallwood added.
Kerkhove said that despite the continuous viral transmission all over the world, all countries now have tools to manage severe cases of the disease and death. Based on WHO data from Dec. 5, 2022, to Jan. 1 this year, 14.5 million cases and over 46,000 new fatalities were reported globally. This translates to an increase of 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively, from the previous month.
“I think this virus will transmit in all seasons. But [the] transmission will tend to be more intense in these seasons which we all go inside and gather more people are much closer together. That aligns very much with the same risks of respiratory syncytial virus and flu. So we’re adding another virus onto that already heavy load on our health systems in the winter,” he said.
Kerkhove had previously shared the WHO’s plan to end the global health emergency on COVID-19 in 2022. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed the same hope for 2023. It was unclear if XBB.1.5 would cause its own wave of global infections. Current vaccines continue to protect against severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death, experts say.
XBB.1.5 is another descendant of Omicron, the most contagious and now globally dominant variant of the virus that causes COVID-19. It is an offshoot of XBB, first detected in October, itself a recombinant of two other Omicron subvariants.