SEVERAL EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, including Ireland, Germany, France, and Italy, lifted their Covid curbs too “brutally” and are now seeing a rise in cases likely due to the more transmissible BA2 variant, the World Health Organization has said.

WHO Europe director Hans Kluge told a press conference in Moldova that he was “optimistic but vigilant” about the pandemic’s development in Europe.

Covid is on the rise in 18 out of 53 countries in the WHO European region, he said.

“The countries where we see a particular increase are the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, France, Italy and Germany”.

He said the main reason behind the increase was likely the BA2 variant, which experts say is about 30% more contagious, but not more dangerous, than its predecessor BA1.

But in addition, “those countries are lifting the restrictions brutally from too much to too few,” he said.

According to the WHO database, the number of new Covid cases in Europe fell sharply after a peak at the end of January, but has been on the rise again since early March.

Over the past seven days, more than 5.1 million new cases and 12,496 deaths have been reported in the WHO’s European region.

That brings the number of cases since the start of the pandemic to almost 194.4 million and the number of deaths to more than 1.92 million.

Ireland

The Department of Health reported 63,954 cases of Covid-19 since St Patrick’s Day. As of 8am yesterday morning, there were 1,308 people in hospital with the virus, with 49 in ICU.

Despite the rise in cases, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said that the Government has no plans to reintroduce Covid restrictions.

Speaking this morning, he said: “At the moment, there is no public health advice being given to us that we should reintroduce masks or re-impose restrictions in any way. Unless that comes, we’re not going to do it. We don’t anticipate it.”

“It was always expected that when restrictions were eased, that there would be an increase in infections. That will fall off over the next couple of weeks,” he said.

Varadkar said that while we are seeing an increase in the number of people in hospital with Covid, about half of the people in hospital and in ICU with Covid “would be there anyway – they are actually in because of other conditions”. 

He said that some hospitals were under pressure and being forced to curtail elective procedures, but there are still no plans to reintroduce restrictions.

“It is often the case in winter periods, and the typically flu season runs in Ireland from October, November until the end of March,” he said.

“In many ways, Covid-19 is replacing flu as the main winter virus that affects us during the winter and sometimes it is necessary to pare back or defer elective activities.

“It is not desirable. It is not something that we would like to see happening.”

Professor Luke O’Neill has said that the BA2 variant of Covid is much more infectious and is spreading more and more widely.

BA2 variant

Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne, the immunologist said the variant, “a sister of Omicron”, could be “the most infectious virus we’ve seen”. 

“It’s 30% more infectious than Omicron, which is already 70% more infectious than the previous one. Yet again, the spike has changed in the virus and it sticks to your lungs much more readily and hench, spreads much more quickly,” he said.

“Secondly, the incubation time is shorter in someone who’s infected, so [it] grows more quickly in someone’s body, and that means it’ll spread more because it grows more rapidly.”

O’Neill said it is now “almost impossible” to avoid getting this variant of Covid, but added that the high level of vaccine uptake is curbing the threat of the variant. 

“The great news is that the wall of vaccinations is holding up massively all over the world and really is protecting us,” he said.

He stressed that people who have not yet received their third Covid vaccine to do so, and that vulnerable people should receive a fourth jab against the virus.

Kluge said Europe was relatively well set to cope with the virus now.

“There is a very large capital of immunity … either thanks to the vaccination or due to the infection.”

In addition, “winter is finishing so people will gather less in small, crowded places, and thirdly, we know that Omicron is milder in fully vaccinated people including a booster”, he said.

However, he recalled that “in countries with a low vaccination rate it’s still a disease which kills.”

Kluge said the world “will have to live with” Covid “for quite a time, but that does not mean that we cannot get rid of the pandemic.”

In order to do so, he said countries needed to protect the vulnerable, strengthen their surveillance and genomic sequencing, and get access to new antiviral medicines.

Finally, he said countries needed to take care of ‘post-covid’ sufferers and the backlog of medical care that has arisen during the pandemic.

With reporting from Jane Moore and the Press Association.