WHO official says when the coronavirus pandemic is going to end

The coronavirus pandemic will last throughout 2021 and is about to end by early 2022, Hans Kluge, the head of the Regional Office for Europe of the World Health Organization said in an interview with German national daily Die Welt.

Kluge suggested that the pandemic will not recede during 2021, but the crisis will become more predictable and manageable.

The WHO representative described the previous year 2020 as "terra incognita, scientific and political darkness."

A year later, mankind knows much more about the coronavirus and developed tools to flight it, including diagnostics and vaccines, Kluge stressed.

"However, in my job it is important to be able to plan ahead. Therefore, I assume that the pandemic will end in early 2022," the head of the WHO European Office said.

He warned that this does not mean that the virus will completely disappear.

Earlier, Microsoft founder Bill Gates suggested that the world may not return to the pre-Covid  state until 2022, since the measures that are being taken now are "not enough to end the pandemic." The billionaire noted that the emergence of new strains of the virus and re-infections may lead to the fact that it will take mankind all of 2022 to fight the disease.