Washington Post – “The omicron variant is expected to have infected more than half the population in the European region in the next six to eight weeks if current trends hold, a World Health Organization official said Tuesday. In the first week of 2022, Europe registered at least 7 million cases of the coronavirus, more than doubling over a two-week period, WHO regional director Hans Kluge told an online briefing. Almost all the countries in the WHO’s European region — 53 nations and territories including some in Central Asia — have confirmed omicron cases. “At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation … forecasts that more than 50 percent of the population in the region will be infected with omicron in the next six to eight weeks,” he wrote on Twitter. The latest data confirms the variant’s high transmissibility, according to Kluge, “because the mutations it has enable it to adhere to human cells more easily, and it can infect even those who have been previously infected or vaccinated.”…”