“We do not have the information that’s necessary to make the recommendation on whether or not a booster will be needed,” Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, said in a Zoom interview Friday. The “science is still evolving.”

Scientists say comparing the prevalence of Covid to the flu, which kills about 650,000 people globally each year, will become an important yardstick come next fall and winter. Covid has killed more than 3.8 million people since the start of 2020, but vaccinated countries should eventually be able to treat its periodic resurgences in the same way as they do the flu — and make policy decisions accordingly.

New cases are up nearly 30% in the past week and deaths are up by 15%, she said, with five countries — South Africa, Tunisia, Zambia, Uganda and Namibia — accounting for 76% of the new cases. The continent of 1.3 billion people has not yet been battered with an emergency during the pandemic on the scale of that recently facing India, but officials including Moeti continue to warn that such a catastrophe could hit.
“Africa is in the midst of a full blown third wave…We’ve seen in India and elsewhere how quickly COVID-19 can rebound and overwhelm health systems,” Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, told a news conference.