Weekly cases in Europe dropped from a plateau of 1.7 million in mid-April to around 685,000 new cases last week, down 60 percent in a month, "the director of the European department said in a virtual press conference, Hans Kluge. The official of the World Health Organisation (WHO) considered that "vaccines are a light at the end of the tunnel, but that light cannot be allowed to blind". "We are in the right direction, but we need to continue to monitor the virus that took the lives of almost 1.2 million people in this region, equivalent to the population of Brussels," the capital of Belgium, he said.

With the lifting of restrictive measures of population and society movements, it will be necessary to "redouble efforts in sequencing [virus genetics to detect variants], isolation [of infected people], contact screening, quarantine and vaccination" to "maintain control and ensure that trends continue to decline, "he recommended. "There is no zero risk", he pointed out, considering that the current progress "is fragile" and pointing out that in at least eight countries in the European region, "the incidence remains high, above 150 cases per 100 thousand inhabitants, therefore the pandemic has not yet he finished". The known variants and potential new variants are "a persistent threat" and pose "new uncertainties", he warned, referring to the one that was detected in India and that is in half of the nearly five dozen countries in Europe.