World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned of the dangers of claims that the omicron strain is the last variant of COVID-19 and that the pandemic is at an end.
“The potential for a more lethal variant is very real,” the WHO chief said at the 150th session of the WHO Executive Board, organized via videoconference in Geneva.
Speaking to the session, Ghebreyesus recalled that in the two years since the start of the pandemic, 350 million cases of the disease and 5.5 million deaths have been recorded worldwide. “We all know that the real numbers are much higher,” Ghebreyesus said.
Last week, an average of 100 cases were reported to the WHO every three seconds, he said. Every 12 seconds, one person dies with a diagnosis of COVID-19, the head of WHO emphasized.
Nine weeks after the first cases of Omicron infection appeared, more than 80 million cases have been reported to the WHO, far more than in all of 2020, Ghebreyesus said.
At the same time, the head of WHO noted that the explosive growth in the number of cases of COVID-19 has not yet affected mortality, but there are deaths from this disease in all regions, especially in Africa, where access to vaccines is at the lowest level.
