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New Delhi: With cases of the new COVID-19 type Omicron confirmed in seven countries in the Southeast Asia region, the World Health Organization on Saturday called for an urgent scale-up of public health and social measures to prevent its further spread.
Poonam Khetrapal Singh, regional director for the WHO South-East Asia Region, said countries can and should contain the spread of omicrons with proven health and social measures.
“Our focus should be on protecting the least protected and those at high risk,” she said in a statement.
The overall threat posed by Omicron depends largely on three key questions – its transmittance; How well the vaccine and prior SARS-CoV-2 infection protect against it, and how virulent the variant is compared to other types.
“From what we know so far, Omicron appears to be spreading faster than the delta variant, which has been attributed to the increase in cases around the world over the past several months,” Singh said.
Emerging data from South Africa suggest an increased risk of re-infection with Omicron, he said, adding that there is still limited data on the clinical severity associated with Omicron.
He said more information is needed to fully understand the clinical picture of people infected with Omicron.
We expect more information in the coming weeks. Singh said that while Omicron should not be dismissed lightly, even though it causes less severe disease, the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm health systems.
Therefore, there is a need to review the health care capacity including ICU beds, oxygen availability, adequate health care staff and augmentation capacity and strengthen it at all levels, he emphasized.
We should keep doing all this. Protect yourself and protect each other. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, keep your distance, open windows, clean your hands, and cough and sneeze safely. Singh said that even after taking the dose of vaccine, keep taking all the precautions.
On the effect of the new variant on vaccines, he said preliminary data suggests that the effectiveness of vaccines against infection may be reduced by the Omicron variant.
However, studies are underway to better understand the extent to which Omicron can evade vaccine and/or infection-derived immunity and the extent to which current vaccines protect against Omicron-associated severe disease and death, he said. said.
Globally, the pandemic is driven by the delta variant, against which vaccines provide a strong level of protection against serious illness, hospitalization, and death. Therefore, efforts to increase vaccination coverage should continue, the WHO official said.
Vaccines are an important tool in our fight against the pandemic, but, as we know, no country can come out of this pandemic with a vaccine alone. Singh said that we should increase vaccination as well as implement public health and social measures, which have proved to be important to limit the transmission of COVID-19 and reduce deaths.
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