WHO chief scientist urges people not to panic at Omicron Coronavirus pandemic News

A leading scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged people not to panic Omicron coronavirus variant and said it was too early to say whether vaccines should be renewed.

Speaking at a Reuters Next conference on Friday, Soumya Swaminathan said it was impossible to predict that Omicron would become a major strain.

At least Omicron has been detected 38 countries It has reached seven out of nine provinces in Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East and Europe and South Africa, where it was first identified. Many governments have tightened travel rules to keep the variant out.

Swaminathan said Omicron was “highly transmissible” and cited South African data showing a number of cases that double daily.

“How should we worry? We have to be prepared and cautious, not scared, because we are in a different situation a year ago, ”he said.

“The delta accounts for 99 percent of infections worldwide. This variant should be more transmissible to compete and dominate the world. It’s possible, but it’s unpredictable.”

Much remains unknown Omikron, While struggling with a wave of infection in the most popular part of Europe.

“We have to wait, let’s hope it’s warmer … but it’s too early to conclude about the whole variant,” Swaminathan said.

The WHO said on Friday it had not yet seen any news of Omicron-related deaths.

WHO Emergency Management Officer Mike Ryan said on Friday that there was no evidence to support a change in vaccines to suit Omicron.

“Right now, we have very effective vaccines that are working. We need to focus on distributing them more equitably. We need to focus on people who are most at risk of getting vaccinated, “Ryan said at a social media event.

WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said in a statement to the United Nations in Geneva that vaccine manufacturers must be prepared to adapt their products.

Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech, a German company that vaccinates COVID with Pfizer, told Reuters Next that the company should be able to adjust its plans fairly quickly.

Sahin also said that current vaccines must continue to protect against serious diseases, despite mutations.

“I believe in principle [point in time] we will need a new vaccine against this new variant. The question is, how urgent should it be? ”Sahin said.

Omicron was first reported to the WHO from South Africa on 24 November, and the first case confirmed in the laboratory was identified from a copy received on 9 November.

Maria Van Kerkhov, WHO’s technical director of COVID-19, said that a delay in virus sequences had occurred in November, meaning that some of the first cases could still be found outside South Africa.

The number of COVID-19 infections exceeded three million in South Africa on Friday as new new infections caused by the Omicron variant rose sharply, official figures show.

On Friday, 16,055 new cases were reported in a 24-hour reporting cycle, bringing the accumulated laboratory confirmed cases to 3,004,203.

“This increase represents a positivity rate of 24.3 percent,” the government-run National Institute for Communicable Diseases said in a daily update.

Worrying insertion gaps

Vaccination rates vary from country to country, but there are worrying gaps in the poorest countries. Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world and once the COVID-19 epicenter of Asia, has fully integrated about 35 percent of its population.

The head of the Red Cross said on Friday that Omicron’s appearance was “the latest evidence” of the risk of different vaccine rates around the world.

“The scientific community has repeatedly warned the international community about the dangers of very new variants in places where the vaccination rate is very low,” said Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Moon Associations. In an interview with the AFP news agency in Moscow.

About 65 percent of people in high-income countries have had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, compared to more than 7 percent in low-income countries, according to UN figures.

Many scientists say that the way to stop the spread of the virus is to make sure that poor countries have access to vaccines, not to provide booster infusions to people in rich countries.

Nearly 264 million people have been reported to be infected with coronavirus since it was detected in central China in late 2019, and 5.48 million people have been killed, according to Reuters estimates.