High Levels of Death, Hospitalizations From COVID Could End in 2022: WHO

SARS-CoV-2 will still be circulating next year, but the World Health Organization (WHO) believes the "acute" phase of the pandemic, in which many people are hospitalized and killed from the virus, could be behind us.

It's likely too late for the world to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 anytime soon, so the primary goal of the world should be to inoculate the highest risk populations, according to the WHO. If the world is able to solve the vaccine equity portion of the pandemic equation and prepare for future waves of cases, WHO officials believe the most tragic part of the outbreak can end.

"This is going to be a bumpy road to low levels of COVID," Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, said at Wednesday's briefing. "The pandemic that's been associated with the tragedy of deaths and hospitalizations, that can end in 2022. The virus itself is very unlikely to go away completely and will probably settle down into a pattern of transmission at a low level."

A 70 percent threshold for vaccinations has often been touted as the minimum level of inoculations needed to reach herd immunity. However, WHO officials said on Wednesday that the exact percentage of vaccinations are less important than who is being vaccinated.

Ryan called it "key" that the most vulnerable people and health care workers are vaccinated against COVID-19 and noted that it's the same strategy the world employs for the flu. While some people get inoculated against the flu every year regardless of their risk level, vaccinations predominately target those who are more likely to get seriously ill.

WHO officials have spent months, if not a year, calling for countries to embark on a global vaccination effort instead of focusing on a domestic strategy. While many countries have met or exceeded the 70 percent mark for vaccinations, some countries have struggled to inoculate their elderly populations and health care workers.

Dr. Tedros Adhnom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, called for countries to share vaccines "faster" and criticized vaccines being sent to low-income countries close to their expiration date or without syringes. He called on governments to work with WHO on a campaign to end global vaccine inequity and warned that the virus will continue to threaten health systems if the world's collective response doesn't improve in 2022.

America is among the countries that have started rolling out booster doses against the advice of the WHO, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) denied it was a strategy that put the world at risk. He noted that America's donated significant numbers of vaccine doses to other countries and argued that the United States can both help vaccinate the world while improving protections for its own people.

As long as there are vaccine inequities, Ryan said that there will be occasional outbreaks in unvaccinated and under-vaccinated populations even if the world is generally seeing a low level of transmission with COVID-19. The "end game" though, is still to get to those low transmission levels, because it would mean an end to the pandemic.

Ryan noted that COVID-19 could follow a similar pattern as H1N1 pandemic, where the virus is still around more than a decade later, but isn't causing the death and destruction it did in 2009. He credited that mainly to vaccinating the most vulnerable populations.