The World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said on Friday that the world was not yet at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic as there would be more coronavirus variants.
“We have seen the virus evolve, mutate … so we know there will be more variants, more variants of concern, so we are not at the end of the pandemic,” Swaminathan told reporters in South Africa, where she was visiting vaccine manufacturing facilities with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Africa on track
Almost two years after Africa identified its first case of COVID-19 (14 February 2020), the World Health Organization (WHO) finds that, if current trends continue, the continent can control the pandemic in 2022.
However, WHO warned that continued vigilance is key.
Over the last two years, the continent has witnessed four waves of COVID-19, each with higher peaks or more total new cases than the previous one. The surges have been mostly driven by new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus—which were highly transmissible though not necessarily more fatal than prior waves.
Each subsequent wave has triggered a response that has been more effective than the previous, with each surge shorter by 23% on average from the one before. While the first wave lasted about 29 weeks, the fourth wave was over in six weeks, or about a fifth of the time.
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