The COVID-19 pandemic can be considered over and is currently an endemic disease, German virologist Christian Drosten said in comments published Monday in German daily Tagesspiegel, as cited by DPA and Agerpres.

“We faced the first endemic wave of Sars-CoV-2 this winter; In my estimation, the pandemic is over,” said Drosten, head of the virology department at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital.

After this winter, immunity among the population will be so high and stable that the virus has little chance in the summer, he added. The virologist noted that the only limitation could be another mutation.

“But I don’t expect anything like that at the moment,” he added.

Intensive care physician Christian Karagiannidis, who is also a member of Germany’s expert council on COVID-19, said the pandemic will likely end once winter passes.

“I expect the pandemic to pass gradually,” Karagiannidis said in an interview with Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND).

German experts talk about “solid immunity” in the face of COVID-19

While one or two waves of COVID-19 are still possible, population immunity is strong and far fewer patients with COVID-19 are in intensive care, Karagiannidis said.

Meanwhile, a wave of other respiratory infections has peaked in Germany, Karagiannidis said.

“We now know that a very strong wave of infections has reached its peak and that it will subside in the coming days,” Karagiannidis told RND.

He added that there are already signs of a slight decrease in syncytial virus (RSV) infections, as well as other infectious diseases.

At the same time, Karagiannidis warned about the possible blocking of some regional hospitals on New Year’s Eve and New Year. For this reason, he called on the population to abandon New Year’s fireworks due to the risk of injury.

What the WHO says about the pandemic caused by the coronavirus

The Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in mid-September that the world has never been in a better position to put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are not there yet. But the end is in sight,” the head of the WHO said at the time.

But in early December, Ghebreyesus also warned that reduced vigilance over Covid-19 was fueling the emergence of new variants and that there were more than 500 sub-variants of Omicron.

“WHO estimates that at least 90% of the world’s population currently has some form of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to previous infection or vaccination,” the WHO director announced.

But he cautioned against the temptation to prematurely assume that the new phase of the pandemic is over because “we’re not there yet” and “gaps in monitoring, testing, sequencing and vaccination continue to create the perfect conditions for a new variant of concern to emerge that could cause significant mortality.” .

The WHO director-general’s comments came days after Chinese authorities announced the easing of draconian restrictions imposed since the start of the pandemic to combat the spread of the coronavirus as part of the Beijing government’s “Zero Covid” strategy.

Since then, the number of coronavirus infections in China has skyrocketed amid low natural immunity of the population and the questionable effectiveness of the country’s developed Covid vaccines, with fears that the pandemic could cause another one million deaths in the country.