The world will cope with the COVID pandemic in early 2022, but this doesn’t mean that the infection will disappear, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge said in an interview with Die Welt newspaper, Report informs, referring to TASS.
"I think 2021 will be another year of COVID-19," he said. "But now we can better predict and manage events. In 2020, there was only uncertainty in both healthcare and politics. A year later, we know much more, we have the tools, the diagnostic programs, the vaccine."
The WHO spokesman urged to be patient on the issue of vaccination.
"In the beginning, demand always exceeds supply. You cannot vaccinate the inhabitants of the entire planet at once," Kluge noted, adding that it is apparently inevitable that citizens in Europe will have vaccination passports in the summer, although this is not a WHO recommendation.
"We don’t know how long immunity lasts after vaccination," he argued. "Plus, a vaccination passport exacerbates inequality."