The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, pointed out that the record numbers of infections with the new variant of Covid-19, which is rapidly transmitting and spreading, mean that hospitals are suffering from severe pressure.
“While omicron actually appears to be less dangerous compared to the delta mutant, especially in vaccinated people, this does not mean that it should be classified as mild,” he said at a press conference. “.
And he continued, “In fact, the tsunami of injuries is so huge and so fast that it overwhelms health systems around the world.”
Last week, the World Health Organization reported 9.5 million new cases of COVID-19, a record 71 percent higher than the previous week’s tally.
But even these numbers are less than the actual numbers, according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, because they do not reflect the decrease in the number of tests during the Christmas and New Year holidays, the results of unrecorded positive self-tests and cases not recorded by overburdened surveillance systems.
Tedros used his first speech in 2022 to criticize the rich countries’ monopoly of available vaccine doses last year, saying that this created a fertile ground for the emergence of mutants of the virus.
He called on the world to share and distribute vaccines more equitably in 2022, with the aim of ending the “death and destruction” caused by Covid-19.
Tedros hopes that 70 percent of each country’s population will receive the COVID-19 vaccine by mid-2022.
But if the vaccination rate remains the same, 109 countries will not achieve this goal.
“Unequal access to the vaccine is killing people and jobs and undermining the global economic recovery,” he said, adding that “administering booster doses of the vaccine one by one in a small number of countries will not end a pandemic while billions of people are still not fully immunized.”
And Maria Van Kerkhove, Technical Officer for Covid-19 at the World Health Organization, indicated that it is “unlikely” that another omicron mutant of concern will be before the pandemic ends.
And she called on people to intensify the measures they were taking to protect themselves previously from the virus.
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