“COVID is here to stay,” emphasized World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe, Hans Kluge, MD, at a press briefing on January 16, 2024. He stressed the need for continuing vigilance and efforts to keep the disease at the top of the political and healthcare agendas, while attention may be drifting to other major global events.

Kluge said that the unpredictable nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus means that the emergence of new variants could cause the current situation to rapidly worsen.

Edoardo Colzani, MD, the Principal Expert on Respiratory Viruses at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), told Medscape Medical News that in the EU and European Economic Area, “Countries report a mix of increasing and decreasing trends in SARS-CoV-2 activity, COVID-19 hospitalizations, and ICU admissions and deaths, with severe outcomes predominantly among those aged 65 years and above.”

“Member States should be ready for the possible need to increase emergency department and ICU capacity, in terms of adequate staffing and bed capacity, for both adult and pediatric hospitals,” said Colzani. “Hospital administrators and managers should ensure that resources, such as medical and nursing staff and equipment, are also available.”

As the virus continues to evolve, the ECDC view, generally shared by the WHO, is that there are currently no new variants of concern, but there are some variants of interest that are being closely monitored. “JN.1, which is a sub-lineage of the BA.2.86 variant, has been particularly increasing in proportion recently, but without so far causing a visible impact on the epidemiological indicators,” said Colzani.

The prevalence of the diverse range of issues characterized as long COVID is another major aspect of the disease. The WHO estimated that 36 million people across the WHO European region may have developed long COVID over the first 3 years of the pandemic.

Looking to the future, Catherine Smallwood, MD, COVID-19 Incident Manager of WHO/Europe, told the press briefing, “We are working…in the European region and beyond to revise and update pandemic plans [to ensure] that what we’ve experienced in the last pandemic can be documented and included in the pandemic plan for the next one.”