The World Health Organization warned earlier this week that current global conditions are "ideal" for COVID-19 to continue to mutate into more new variants, making it dangerous to assume the Omicron strain will bring the end of the pandemic.

"It is dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant or there we're in the endgame," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated before the agency's executive board on Monday. "On the contrary, globally the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge."

Tedros said in his address that since the Omicron variant was identify by scientists in South Africa about nine weeks ago, more than 80 million new infections have been reported to the agency. That infection rate is more than all the infections reported in 2020, or the first year of the pandemic. Moreover, Tedros said that an average of 100 cases were reported to the WHO every three seconds last week, adding that a life was lost to COVID every 12 seconds.

"To change the course of the pandemic, we must change the conditions that are driving it," Tedros said, adding that the world cannot "gamble on a virus whose evolution we cannot control or predict."

Tedros' remarks came at about the two-year anniversary of the WHO declaring the virus behind that coronavirus pandemic a public health emergency of international concern, which is the highest level of alarm under international law.

Despite the warnings, Tedros is optimistic that the pandemic could reach a turning point this year, as long as the world takes the right course of action. Those actions include achieving the agency's target of vaccinating 70% of the world's population, continuously increasing testing capabilities and strategies, and making sure all nations have equitable access to COVID treatments and other necessary care.

Tedros noted that currently 86 nations across all WHO global regions have not been able to reach the agency's target of vaccinating 40% of their populations, and 34 nations--mostly in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region--have not been able to vaccinate even 10% of their populations. Moreover, 85% of the population of Africa has yet to receive a single dose of vaccine.

"If countries use all of [the agency's] strategies and tools in a comprehensive way, we can end the acute phase of the pandemic this year--we can end COVID-19 as a global health emergency, and we can do it this year," Tedros added.