Europe needs to brace itself for a mounting Omicron wave

Although the outlook in the UK has lightened since the dark days of early December, for much of the continent, the worst may be yet to come, writes Samuel Lovett

A resident of Warsaw receives a booster shot against Covid-19 in December last year (AP)

After South Africa, the UK was among the first countries in the world to face the full force of the Omicron variant.

Spreading rapidly throughout the four nations, Omicron fuelled a sudden surge in infections and hospitalisations, with the government forced to reimpose new Covid-19 restrictions.

Although the outlook in the UK has lightened since the dark days of early December, for much of the continent, there is more to come.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that more than 50 per cent of Europeans will be infected with Omicron in the next six to eight weeks.

A wave of hospitalisations will inevitably follow in each country – the size of which will be dependent on vaccination coverage in each population.

For countries like Portugal – one of the most highly vaccinated countries on the planet – Omicron has already led to a steep jump in infections. But there has been no corresponding rise in deaths. Other nations like France, Spain and Italy will also be able to fall back on their vaccine defences.

But in central and eastern Europe, where uptake is low, it’s likely Omicron will cause far more damage in the weeks and months ahead.

Take Poland as an example. With just 55.8 per cent of adults vaccinated, coverage is much lower than western Europe. To make matters worse, the nation has the lowest number of working doctors in proportion to its population in the EU – just 2.4 to 1,000 inhabitants, compared with 4.5 in Germany.

Poland also has only five nurses to 1,000 inhabitants, below the EU average of eight and far below richer countries like Germany, which has 14.

Poland’s health minister Adam Niedzielski warned that there are already 18,000 people in hospital, making this “the most difficult situation compared to other waves” – and this is before Omicron has even made its presence felt.

Once the variant takes hold, the situation in Poland is likely to further deteriorate – an experience that may be mirrored in other nearby European countries with low vaccination rates, such as Bulgaria (28.1 per cent), Ukraine (31.9 per cent) and Belarus (38 per cent).

Each nation’s Omicron wave will of course be shaped by levels of naturally acquired immunity in the population as well as age, demographics and the quality of healthcare services – but there’s no doubt that the variant poses a significant challenge for much of the continent.

Which is why the WHO was right to shoot down the suggestion, made by Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez, that it’s time to change our approach to coronavirus, perceiving it as an endemic illness, “rather than the pandemic it’s been up to now”.

Mr Sanchez had signalled a policy shift away from counting cases and quarantining, toward a risk-based approach typical of managing outbreaks of diseases like influenza that seeks to protect the most vulnerable.

But the WHO warned that countries were still “a way off” from being able to approach Covid in such a way.

Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said that “because of the unprecedented scale of transmission” the continent was now seeing rising rates of hospitalisation.

“It is challenging health systems and service delivery in many countries where Omicron has spread at speed and threatens to overwhelm many more,” he said.

Catherine Smallwood, senior emergencies officer at WHO Europe, warned: “We really need to hold back on behaving as if it is endemic before the virus itself is behaving as if it is endemic.”

So while it may well be the case that the UK is the closest of any country in the northern hemisphere to exiting the Covid-19 pandemic – as suggested on Tuesday by Professor David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – the situation for large pockets of Europe is less encouraging.

Omicron has changed the game, making any talk of “endemic” premature. The continent needs to brace itself for yet another wave.