Geneva Certain features of the Omicron variant, including its global spread and a large number of mutations, suggest it could have a major impact on the course of the Covid-19 epidemic, said the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO).
With the Omicron variant now present in 57 countries, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus advised at a press briefing that it can spread more fleetly than former variants, Xinhua news agency reported We’re now starting to see a harmonious picture of the rapid-fire increase in transmission ( rates), although for now the exact rate of increase relative to other variants remains delicate to quantify,”he said Arising data from South Africa suggest increased threat ofre-infection with Omicron, but more data are demanded to draw firmer conclusions,”he added.
While some substantiation might suggest that Omicron causes milder symptoms than the earlier Delta variant, it’s still early days to draw any final conclusions, WHO experts have said.
According to Mike Ryan, administrative director of the WHO’s Health Extremities Program, although the evolutionary nature of the contagion makes it more transmittable as it mutates, this does not inescapably make the contagion less severe, as has been suggested by some” civic legends Whether or not a mutation turns out to be milder or further murderous is a matter of chance, he said.
As studies of the rearmost COVID-19 variant are evolving, the WHO says it still needs days or indeed weeks for global epidemiological data to come by, be anatomized and also to draw any establishment conclusions It’s also still unseasonable to say that Omicron could affect in a significant reduction in vaccine effectiveness, according to WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan.
The WHO has called on all countries to increase surveillance, testing and sequencing, and to submit further data to the WHO Clinical Data Platform using an streamlined online case reporting form.