At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said that critical countries and their populations maintain strict social distance and other outbreak control measures for the foreseeable future. In recent weeks, Britain, the United States, France, Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and others have started vaccinating millions of their citizens against the coronavirus.
“Even with vaccines starting to protect the most vulnerable, we will not achieve any level of population immunity or collective immunity in 2021,” said Swaminathan. “Even if it happens in some pockets, in some countries, it is not going to protect people around the world.”
Scientists normally estimate that a vaccination rate of around 70% is required for herd immunity, where entire populations are protected from disease. But some fear that the extremely infectious nature of COVID-19 may demand a significantly higher limit.
Dr Bruce Aylward, an advisor to the WHO director-general, said the UN health agency expects coronavirus vaccinations to begin later this month or in February in some of the world’s poorest countries, calling on the community to do more to ensure all countries have access to vaccines.
“We cannot do this on our own,” said Aylward, saying that WHO needed the cooperation of vaccine manufacturers, in particular, to start immunizing vulnerable populations. Aylward said that WHO plans to have a “deployment plan” detailing which developing countries could start receiving vaccines next month.
Even so, most of the world’s supply of the COVID-19 vaccine has already been purchased by wealthy countries. The UN-supported initiative known as COVAX, which aims to provide vaccines to developing countries, lacks vaccines, money and logistical aid as donor countries struggle to protect their own citizens, especially in the wake of the recently discovered COVID-19 variants in Britain. Britain and South Africa, which many officials blame for the increased spread.
The WHO, however, said that most of the recent spikes in transmission were due to “an increase in the mix of people,” not the new variants.
WHO technical leader at COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, said the increase in cases in several countries was detected before the new variants were identified. Van Kerkhove noted that during the summer, COVID-19 cases dropped to single digits in most countries in Europe.
“We lost the battle because we changed our mixing patterns during the summer, for the fall and especially for Christmas and the New Year,” she said, explaining that many people had many contacts with family and friends during the holidays. “This has had a direct impact on the exponential growth you have seen in many countries,” she said, describing the increase in the case count in some places as “vertical”.
Dr Michael Ryan, WHO’s chief emergency officer, said that while there is some evidence that the variants may be accelerating the spread of COVID-19, “there is no evidence that the variants are leading to any element of gravity.” He said the variants should not alter countries’ strategies to control outbreaks.
“It doesn’t change what you do, but it does give the virus new energy,” said Ryan.
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AP medical writer Maria Cheng reported from Toronto.
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