Covid emergency phase closer to end but Omicron transmission remains: WHO

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that while the world is "much closer" to ending the emergency phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, it warned that Omicron is still circulating rampantly and continues to cause significant mortality.

"We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we are not there yet," WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference here.

The rationale behind this is that "Omicron has proven to be significantly more transmissible than its predecessor, Delta, and continues to cause significant mortality due to the intensity of transmission."

Meanwhile, "gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing and vaccination continue to create the perfect conditions for the emergence of a new variant of concern that could cause significant mortality," Tedros added.

However, the WHO chief admitted that Omicron, with more than 500 sublines circulating, tends to cause less severe disease than previous variants of concern.

The WHO estimates that at least 90 percent of the world's population now has some degree of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, as a result of a previous infection or vaccination.

At least 2.5 million cases worldwide were reported to WHO in the past week alone, but that number grossly underestimated the spread of the virus across the world, according to Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of WHO's Health Emergencies Program. whole world.

Some estimates based on wastewater data have suggested that the number of new cases could be as much as five times higher in some countries, meaning the virus is still circulating rampantly around the world.

"So people over the age of 60, people with underlying conditions, the immunocompromised and our frontline workers... We haven't reached that goal of 100 percent of [vaccinating] at-risk people around the world in every country. And this is where we want that governments focus on," says Van Kerkhove.