Late-night disco partying. Elbow-to-elbow seating in movie theaters. Mask-free baring of faces in public, especially in Europe and North America: Bit by bit, many countries that have been hard-hit by the coronavirus are opening up and easing their tough, and often unpopular, restrictive measures aimed to fight COVID-19 even as the omicron variant — deemed less severe — has caused cases to skyrocket.

The early moves to relax such restrictions evoke a new turning point in a nearly two-year pandemic that has been full of them…

But the U.N. health agency, ever leery about how a virus still spreading widely might evolve, warned about underestimating omicron.

“We are concerned that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines — and because of omicron’s high transmissibility and lower severity — preventing transmission is no longer possible and no longer necessary,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gheybreysus said at a regular WHO briefing on the pandemic on Tuesday. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”