Beijing, February 10 (Xinhua) -- World Health Organization officials said on the 8th that many countries around the world have not yet passed the peak of the epidemic brought about by the mutated new coronavirus Omilton strain. Since the mutation was discovered last November, there have been 130 million new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 500,000 new deaths worldwide.
ACCORDING TO WHO data, as of 16:00 CET on the 8th, the cumulative number of confirmed covid-19 cases worldwide exceeded 396 million, and the cumulative number of deaths exceeded 5.74 million.
Abdi Mahmoud, WHO's COVID-19 response officer, said that "it is sad to say that the Olmikron variant is milder, but ignores the fact that 500,000 people have died since its discovery", a fact that has occurred after the advent of a COVID-19 vaccine that has been proven effective.
Pedestrians wearing masks pass through a COVID-19 testing site in London, Uk., on December 6, 2021. (Xinhua News Agency, photo by Rey Tang)
Maria VanKelkhof, WHO's technical head of COVID-19, said the number of confirmed cases of infection with the Omikejun strain was "staggering" and that the actual number of cases could be even higher. The surge in cases following the spread of the Olmikron strain dwarfs the previous peaks of the outbreak.
"We are still in the midst of an outbreak," she said, "and many countries have not yet reached the peak of infection in Omikejong." She is extremely disturbed by the fact that the number of new deaths has been on the rise in recent weeks, suggesting that "the virus is still dangerous."
The one-week epidemic report released by WHO on the 8th showed that nearly 19.3 million new cases were confirmed globally last week, a decrease of 17% from the previous week; but 68,000 new deaths, an increase of 7% over the previous week. Of the new cases reported last week, 58% were reported in the WHO European Region and 23% in the Americas Region, and 35% in the European Region and 44% in the Americas Region in the new deaths.
Office building of the World Health Organization headquarters, photographed in Geneva, Switzerland, on 30 March 2021. (Photo by Xinhua news agency reporter Chen Junxia)
Omikeron has replaced the Delta mutant as the world's leading epidemic strain. According to WHO data, 96.7% of the samples that have been genetically sequenced and uploaded to the Influenza Data Sharing Global Initiative database over the past 30 days were Omi kerong, compared with 3.3% for Delta.
The spread of Omikeron has led to a new record number of confirmed cases in many countries, and the daily increase in cases in the United States once exceeded 1 million. According to data from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, in January this year alone, more than 20 million new cases were confirmed in the United States, and more than 96,000 new deaths were confirmed.
Some countries are relaxing or intend to relax anti-epidemic restrictions to varying degrees, citing high vaccination rates and the relatively mild disease caused by the more contagious Omilton strain. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated his concern about this tendency at a press conference on the 1st of this month. On the same day, Van Krkhof reminded governments that the "unsealing" should be carried out in a steady and slow manner. (Chen Lixi)