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The World Health Organization told governments on Tuesday it was too early to predict that the COVID-19 pandemic will burn itself out, as it warned that more than half of people in Europe would catch the disease over the next two months, The Politico reported. 

With the highly contagious Omicron strain unleashing "a new west-to-east tidal wave sweeping across the region," hospitalizations can be expected to rise, WHO Europe chief Hans Kluge told a press conference.

The intervention by the global health body came after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez signaled a policy shift away from counting cases and quarantining, toward a risk-based approach typical of managing outbreaks of diseases like influenza that seeks to protect the most vulnerable.

Now was not the time to conclude that the pandemic will fade out, the WHO said, with the coronavirus as capable as ever of evolving and posing a new threat.

“In terms of endemicity, we’re still a way off,” Catherine Smallwood, WHO Europe’s senior emergency officer, told the same briefing.

“Endemicity assumes that, first of all, there’s stable circulation of the virus at predictable levels, and potentially known and predictable waves of epidemic transmission,” she said. “We really need to hold back on behaving as if it’s endemic before … the virus itself is behaving as if it’s endemic.”