(Berlin) Germany will impose drastic restrictions on the unvaccinated akin to near-containment, as a wind of panic blows in the world over the Omicron variant, of which the first five cases have been detected in the New York State and is beginning to be transmitted between people inside the United States.
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday announced a tightening of restrictions on people not vaccinated against COVID-19, who will no longer have access to non-essential shops, restaurants, places of culture or leisure.
They will also have to limit their contact, at home or abroad.
These measures were taken after a meeting with his successor, Olaf Scholz, and the leaders of the 16 regions of the country. A draft law on compulsory vaccination, which Mr Scholz is in favor of, will be submitted to parliament for entry into force in February or March.
PHOTO JOHN MACDOUGALL, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
Angela Merkel, outgoing Chancellor of Germany, and her successor, Olaf Scholz
In the United States, five cases of the Omicron variant were confirmed in New York state on Thursday and one in Minnesota. In the latter case, the infected person had traveled to New York but had not traveled abroad, showing that the variant began to be transmitted between people in the United States.
Faced with the threat of a relaunch of the pandemic, US President Joe Biden presented a new plan to fight COVID-19 on Thursday, which, however, does not contain any radical or restrictive measures.
International travelers will have to present a negative test carried out in the day before their departure, the tests carried out at home will now be reimbursed but Mr. Biden has refrained from taking measures that are too politically risky, in a country where less than 60% of the population is fully vaccinated.
While his attempts to impose vaccination in particular in businesses met with opposition from Republicans, he felt that the fight against COVID-19 “should not” be a matter of political division.
Elsewhere in the world, restrictions are increasing. In Norway, the government on Thursday introduced new health restrictions in Oslo and its region after the appearance of a suspected outbreak of the variant among dozens of people who were all vaccinated, during a Christmas meal.
In Switzerland, 2,000 people including 1,600 students were placed in quarantine after the discovery of two cases of the variant on a campus of the very famous International School of Geneva.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), based in Stockholm, for its part indicated that “preliminary data suggest a substantial advantage” of the new variant over the hitherto dominant Delta variant.
Based on these mathematical models, “Omicron could cause more than half of infections caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the European Union within the next few months,” the agency warned on Thursday.
Especially since, according to a study by South African scientists, the risk of catching COVID-19 again is increased with the Omicron variant.
For the time being, underlined in Geneva the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the insufficient vaccination coverage against COVID-19 and that of the level of screening constitute a mixture ” toxic ”.
– ” Matter of choice ”
It is “a perfect recipe for variants to reproduce and amplify”, he warned, stressing that the end of the pandemic was “a matter of choice”.
The first major event to fall victim to it, the next part of COP15 – the UN convention on biodiversity – which should have taken place in January in Geneva, was postponed because of “uncertainties” linked to the Omicron variant.
In South Africa, where the identification of the Omicron variant was announced last week and where less than a quarter of the population is vaccinated, the authorities described Wednesday before Parliament an “exponential” spread of the virus. The new variant is already dominant there.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres denounced the border closures, calling them a form of “apartheid” against an insufficiently vaccinated Africa.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also said that the priority remained to “ensure that vaccines are produced and distributed as quickly as possible throughout the world”.
The Omicron variant has been spotted on all continents, especially in Europe, already faced before its appearance with a strong rebound in the epidemic.
The States of the Old Continent have decided to tighten again the health restrictions: border controls, ban on travel to southern Africa, compulsory mask in transport and shops in the United Kingdom, recommendation to vaccinate vulnerable children in France, etc.
“Viruses without borders”
Various laboratories, including Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer / BioNTech and Novavax, have expressed confidence in their ability to create a new vaccine against Omicron. Russia has also announced that it is working on a version of its Sputnik V specifically targeting this variant.
Never has a variant of COVID-19 caused so much concern since the emergence of Delta, which is currently dominant and already highly contagious.
The WHO considers “high” the “probability that Omicron spreads globally”, even if many unknowns remain: contagiousness, effectiveness of existing vaccines, severity of symptoms. To date, however, no deaths associated with Omicron have been reported.
COVID-19 has killed at least 5,223,072 people worldwide since it emerged in China at the end of 2019, according to an AFP count on Thursday.