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World Health Organization (WHO) experts emphasised on Wednesday that vaccines are still highly effective against Covid-19, despite new variants of the disease emerging in South Africa and the United States.
According to WHO data, global Covid-19 cases are steadily declining, with reported weekly deaths at their lowest level since March 2020. However, the Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned at a press conference on Wednesday that these trends do not tell the whole story, according to Xinhua.
“Driven by Omicron sub-variants, we are seeing an increase in reported cases in the Americas and Africa. The South African scientists who identified Omicron late last year have now reported two more Omicron sub-variants, BA.4 and BA.5, as the reason for a spike in cases in South Africa,” he said.
BA.4 and BA.5 have been detected in a number of countries, according to Maria van Kerkhove of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program. The severity of the two new variants is still being assessed by the WHO.
However, van Kerkhove stated that it is not yet possible to confirm whether BA.4 and BA.5 have resulted in increased hospitalizations, as any increase could be due to a general increase in case numbers in South Africa. Nonetheless, she emphasised that “vaccines continue to work incredibly well in terms of preventing severe disease and death.”
She also urged the WHO to continue monitoring and testing for COVID-19 in order to provide the public with the most accurate information and advice possible.
Source:OCN
