Hope 'that the worst of latest Covid wave is over' says WHO boss

Concern remains for countries with low vaccination rates, the World Health Organization has said.

There is now hope that the worst of the Omicron wave of the Covid-10 pandemic is over for many countries, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

Countries with a high vaccination rate are seeing decreasing Covid-19 cases, but concern remains for those with low vaccination rates, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing today.

“In some countries, they [cases] seem to have peaked which gives hope that the worst of this latest wave is done, but no country is out of the woods yet,” he said.

With 19m new cases globally last week, and weekly deaths at around 45,000, WHO officials advised caution.

“Now is not the time to give up and wave the white flag, we can still significantly reduce the impact of the current wave by sharing and using health tools effectively,” said Dr Ghebreyesus

Here, the Department of Health reported 11,683 cases of Covid-19 including 5,767 PCRs and 5,916 from antigen testing today. 

The positivity rate has dropped to 31.8% from a high of 56.9%.

There were 979 Covid-patients in hospitals including 93 in intensive care, with numbers in critical care remaining under 100 since December 22.

Professor Sam McConkey said stabilising numbers in Irish hospitals is “good news” and pointed out that many admitted patients are not as ill as those in previous waves.

“It is different to the previous waves when people couldn’t breathe, that was a horrible nightmare experience,” he said. 

“That seems to have stopped with very few exceptions.” 

He is hopeful new medications including antivirals will benefit people who cannot take vaccines for health reasons. 

“It’s not even about the number of people in hospital on a particular day, it’s the number of new people coming in each day [to watch],” said Prof McConkey, an infectious diseases consultant.

I think we are in a much better place, the risk now in the future is there could be more variants. There probably will be, but what we hope is that the variants will be less transmissible than Omicron and more localised.

Meanwhile, the SouthDoc out-of-hours GP service for Cork and Kerry said it is also seeing a fall in patients presenting with Covid-19. 

Cork GP Diarmuid Quinlan, medical director with the Irish College of General Practitioners, said about attendances last weekend: “It reverted back to normal pre-pandemic, out-of-hours, people with ordinary illnesses.” 

The Irish Examiner previously reported that more than 10,000 people called SouthDoc for PCR tests as Omicron surged in late December.

“We are encouraging our patients now not to neglect their normal non-Covid illnesses,” Dr Quinlan said. 

“We know there has been a lot of deferred care, but general practice is open.”

However, he urged anyone vulnerable to the virus, including women who have recently given birth, to contact their doctors if they become infected.

Meanwhile, Mercy University Hospital Cork has an escalation policy in place due to the high number of patients at the emergency department and appealed to people to use local injury units or SouthDoc instead.