Top Covid expert sees an end to pandemic within two months
A top health official in Denmark has predicted that the Covid pandemic could end within two months in some countries, thanks to the Omicron variant.
Tyra Grove Krause, the chief epidemiologist at Denmark’s State Serum Institute, told Danish TV 2 that a recent study conducted by the institute has found that Covid hospitalisations have halved with Omicron, as opposed to the previous Delta variant.
When questioned about how long the virus will affect daily life in Denmark, she said, “I think it will have that in the next two months, and then I hope the infection will start to subside and we get our normal lives back”.
Dr Grove Krause’s research also stated that “Omicron is here to stay”.
“It will provide some massive spread of infection in the coming month. When it’s over, we’re in a better place than we were before,” the paper said.
Dr Grove Krause claims that daily life may return to normal within a few months as more people are likely to become infected, raising the level of natural immunity for the majority of the population.
“Omicron will peak at the end of January, and in February we will see declining infection pressure and a decreasing pressure on the health care system,” she said. “But we have to make an effort in January, because it will be hard to get through”.
“In the long run, we are in a place where coronavirus is here, but where we have restrained it, and only the particularly vulnerable need to be vaccinated up to the next winter season,” she said.
The optimistic news out of Denmark comes just days after the World Health Organisation made a similarly positive statement about Omicron.
“If we put an end to inequality, we will put an end to the pandemic and the global nightmare that we have all gone through,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a speech on New Year’s Eve.
Top US pandemic Adviser Anthony Fauci also said that the experience in South Africa, where the new variant quickly peaked before subsiding, offered some hope to other countries.
“When one looked at the relationship and the ratio between hospitalisations and cases (in South Africa), it was lower, the duration of hospital stay was lower, the requirements for oxygen was lower,” he said. “We’re seeing a bit of that, not as pronounced, in the UK, but certainly that trend. And if you look here at the United States, we don’t want to get complacent at all, and you don’t want to jump to a positive conclusion, because it’s still early," he said.
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