GENEVA (REUTERS) – People should consider postponing or cancelling events ahead of the holiday season, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday (Dec 20), as evidence shows the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is also leading to breakthrough infections among vaccinated individuals.

In the short term, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva that holiday festivities would in many places lead to "increased cases, overwhelmed health systems and more deaths" and urged people to postpone gatherings.

"An event cancelled is better than a life cancelled," he said. "It's better to cancel now and celebrate later, than to celebrate now and grieve later."

"There is now consistent evidence that Omicron is spreading significantly faster than the Delta variant.

"And it is more likely people vaccinated or recovered from Covid-19 could be infected or reinfected," said Dr Tedros.

WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan added that it would be unwise to conclude from early evidence that Omicron was a milder variant than previous ones.

“With the numbers going up, all health systems are going to be under strain,” Dr Swaminathan told the briefing.

The variant is successfully evading some immune responses, she said, meaning that the booster programmes being rolled out in many countries ought to be targeted towards people with weaker immune systems.

Their comments echoed the findings of the study by Imperial College London, which said last week that the risk of reinfection was more than five times higher and Omicron has shown no sign of being milder than Delta.

WHO officials said, however, that other forms of immunity vaccinations may prevent infection and disease.

While the antibody defences from some actions have been undermined, there has been hope that T-cells, the second pillar of an immune response, can prevent severe disease by attacking infected human cells.

WHO expert Abdi Mahamud said: “Although we are seeing a reduction in the neutralisation antibodies, almost all preliminary analysis shows T-cell mediated immunity remains intact, that is what we really require.” 

However, highlighting how little is known about how to handle the new variant that was detected only last month, Dr Swaminathan said: “Of course there is a challenge, many of the monoclonals will not work with Omicron.” 

She gave no details as she referred to the treatments that mimic natural antibodies in fighting off infections. Some drugmakers have suggested the same.

Ending the pandemic 

But the WHO team also offered some hope to a weary world facing the new wave that 2022 would be the year that the pandemic, which already killed more than 5.6 million people worldwide, would end.

It pointed towards the development of second and third generation vaccines, and the further development of antimicrobial treatments and other innovations.

“(We) hope to consign this disease to a relatively mild disease that is easily prevented, that is easily treated,” Dr Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergency expert, told the briefing.

“If we can keep virus transmission to minimum, then we can bring the pandemic to an end.” 

However, Dr Tedros said China, where the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus was first detected at the end of 2019, must be forthcoming with data and information related to its origin to help the response going forward.

“We need to continue until we know the origins, we need to push harder because we should learn from what happened this time in order to (do) better in the future,” added Dr Tedros.