The director general of the World Health Organization warned that the reduction in contagion surveillance is opening the door to a new strain that can overcome the dominant omicron

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned this Friday about the threat of a new variant of Covid-19, although it calculated that 90% of the world population currently enjoys some immunity to the virus.

At a press conference, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the reduction in surveillance of infections is opening the door to a new variant of the virus, which can overcome the dominant omicron.

“Gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing and vaccination continue to create the perfect conditions for a worrisome new variant to emerge that could cause significant mortality, ” Tedros warned.

On the other hand, the specialist pointed out that the WHO estimates that at least “90% of the world population now has some level of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to a previous infection or vaccination”, referring to the virus that causes Covid-19 disease.

And after that he completed: “We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we are not there yet”.

One year of Omicron

Tedros recalled that last weekend it was one year since the WHO reported a new, more contagious variant, that of omicron.

Currently, there are more than 500 sub-variants of omicron and all are highly transmissible. They also have mutations that allow them to more easily escape immunity, Tedros recalled. Countries have reported 6.6 million deaths from Covid-19 to WHO and almost 640 million infections have also been recorded.

In any case, the UN health agency insists that the data does not reflect the true number of victims. Last week there were more than 8,500 deaths from Covid-19, Tedros recalled. A figure that “is not acceptable” after three years of the pandemic, when “we already have so many tools to prevent infections and save lives.”

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