In November last year, Omicron was declared a variant of the concern.
Geneva:
The World Health Organization mourned on Tuesday that half a million COVID-19 deaths have been recorded since the discovery of the Omicron version, calling the count “beyond tragic”.
WHO events manager Abdi Mahmoud said 130 million cases and 500,000 deaths have been recorded globally since Omicron was declared a type of concern in late November.
Since then it has rapidly overtaken Delta as the world’s leading Covid variant because it is more permeable, although it appears to cause less severe disease.
“In the era of effective vaccines, half a million people are dying, that’s really something,” Mahmood said in a live conversation on WHO’s social media channels.
“When everyone was saying that Omicron is mild, (they) missed the point that half a million people have died since it was discovered.
“It’s beyond tragic.”
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical chief on COVID-19, said the sheer number of omicron cases was “astonishing”, while the true number of cases and deaths would be much higher than just what is known.
“It makes the previous peaks look almost flat,” she said.
“We are still in the middle of this pandemic. I hope we are getting closer to the end of it,” she said. “Many countries have not yet passed their peak of Omicron.”
Van Kerkhove said he was deeply concerned that the number of deaths had increased for several weeks in a row.
“This virus remains dangerous,” she said.
The WHO is tracking four sub-lineages of Omicron. Whereas the BA.1 sub-strain was dominant, BA.2 is more transmissible and is expected to account for the increasing share of omicron cases.
Van Kerkhove said so far there has been no indication that BA.2 resulted in a more severe COVID disease than BA.1, but stressed that gathering evidence was still “very early”. days”.
Mahmood said it was as yet unknown whether someone could be infected with both BA.1 and BA.2 at the same time.
COVID-19 has killed nearly 5.75 million people since it emerged in China in December 2019, according to an AFP tally compiled on Tuesday from official sources.
Around 10.25 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered globally.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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