HERALDING SOUTH Africa’s and Botswana’s decision to report the appearance of the Omicron coronavirus mutation last month, the UN health agency repeated that it will take another two weeks before more is known about how transmissible and how dangerous it actually is.
Speaking
in Geneva, WHO spokesperson
Christian Lindmeier stressed that data suggesting that Omicron was highly transmissible was
only preliminary. He also repeated WHO advice against
blanket travel bans, except for countries whose health systems
were unable to withstand a surge in infections.
“It
is much more preferred to prepare your country, your health system to possibly
incoming cases because we can be pretty sure that this Omicron variant will
spread around,” he said.
The Delta mutation –
declared a variant of concern this summer – is now “predominant”,
Lindmeier added, “with over 90 per cent all around the world. This is how this
virus behaves and we will not most likely be able to keep it out of individual
countries.”
The
WHO official also cautioned against knee-jerk reactions to reports that Omicron
had continued to spread. “Let’s not get deterred right now, let us first get as
much information as possible to make the correct risk assessment based on the
information that we will have and then let’s move on. Let’s not get completely
worried or confused by individual information which are all individually
important, but which need to be brought together in order to assess together,”
he said.
The
development comes as WHO said that it was sending a technical surge team to
South Africa’s Gauteng province to monitor Omicron and help with contract
tracing, amid a spike in coronavirus reinfections.
For
the seven days leading to November 30, South Africa reported a 311% increase in
new cases, compared with the previous seven days, WHO said, adding, the cases
in Gauteng province, where Johannesburg is located, have increased by 375% week
on week.
It
added that hospital admissions there rose 4.2% in the past seven days from the
previous week. And COVID-19-related
deaths in the province jumped 28.6% from the previous seven days.
Announcing
the surge team deployment, Dr. Salam Gueye, WHO Regional Emergency Director for
Africa, also noted that just 102 million Africans in Africa – 7.5% of the
continental population – are now fully vaccinated and that more than 80% of the
population has not received even a single dose. “This is a dangerously wide
gap,” he said.
In
a statement, WHO said that South Africa is reportedly seeing more patients
contracting COVID-19 after having already been infected, in a way it did not
with previous variants, citing a microbiologist from the country’s National
Institute for Communicable Diseases.
Working
with African governments to accelerate studies and bolster the response to the
new variant, WHO is urging countries to sequence between 75 and 150 samples
weekly.
“The detection and
timely reporting of the new variant by Botswana and South Africa has bought the
world time,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director
for Africa.
“We
have a window of opportunity but must act quickly and ramp up detection and
prevention measures. Countries must adjust their COVID-19 response and stop a
surge in cases from sweeping across Africa and possibly overwhelming
already-stretched health facilities,” he said. (UN, Zamboanga Post)
No comments:
Post a Comment