World Not Free From COVID Yet, More Variants Expected: WHO Chief Scientist’s Warning

The chief scientist said the world will learn how to live with the virus, like with other respiratory viruses.

New Delhi: In a significant warning, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan on Friday said that the world was not at the end of the Covid pandemic yet as there would be more coronavirus variants, as reported by international news agency Reuters. She said the world has seen the virus evolve and mutate. “So we know there will be more variants, more variants of concern, so we are not at the end of the pandemic,” Swaminathan was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Swaminathan made these remarks while speaking to reporters in South Africa, where she was visiting vaccine manufacturing facilities with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a separate interview to Bloomberg, Swaminathan had earlier on January 27 said that nobody can predict when the pandemic will end.

“Let’s not declare the pandemic over as some people are doing now. It would be foolish to drop all precautions that we’ve been taking all this time. We need to continue that and hopefully by the end of 2022, we’ll be in a much better position. A variant can arise anywhere and you’re back to square one. We still need to be cautious,” she said.

The chief scientist said the world will learn how to live with the virus, like with other respiratory viruses. “We’ll have much better surveillance systems globally. We know that even if you have an ordinary respiratory infection or a flu, it’s good to keep your mask on. We should take that into the future,” she told Bloomberg.