The WHO on Tuesday said that the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 was spreading at an unprecedented rate and urged countries to act, as drug maker Pfizer said its COVID-19 pill was effective against the variant.
Omicron, first detected by South Africa and reported to the WHO on Nov. 24, has a large number of mutations, setting alarm bells ringing since its discovery.
Early data suggest it can be resistant to vaccines and is more transmissible than the Delta variant, which was first identified in India and accounts for the bulk of the world’s COVID-19 cases.
Photo: Reuters
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that Omicron had been reported in 77 countries and “probably” spread to most nations undetected “at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant.”
Omicron now accounts for about 3 percent of cases in the US, a figure that is expected to rise rapidly as has been seen in other countries.
The US is the nation hit hardest by the pandemic, and on Tuesday, it crossed 800,000 known COVID-19 deaths, a Johns Hopkins University tracker showed.
Although Britain on Monday confirmed what is thought to be the world’s first Omicron death, there is no proof yet that the variant causes more severe illness.
The WHO on Tuesday provided room for cautious optimism, saying Africa had recorded a massive rise in cases over the past week, but a lower number of deaths compared with previous waves.
However, it urged countries to act swiftly to rein in transmission, protect their health systems and guard against complacency.
WHO expert Bruce Aylward warned against “jumping to a conclusion that this is a mild disease.”
“We could be setting ourselves up for a very dangerous situation,” he said.
The warning came as Pfizer on Tuesday said clinical trials of its COVID-19 pill reduced hospital admissions and deaths among at-risk people by almost 90 percent.
The US drugmaker said its new treatment, Paxlovid, held up against Omicron in lab testing.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla called the news a “game changer” and said he expected approval from the US medicines regulator as early as this month.
“This news provides another potentially powerful tool in our fight against the virus, including the Omicron variant,” US President Joe Biden said.
A real-world study from South Africa has showed two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 70 percent effective in stopping severe illness from Omicron.
Researchers called the results encouraging, although it represented a drop compared with protection against earlier strains.
The WHO added that low vaccination rates in regions including Africa would provide breeding grounds for new variants of the virus, which has known to have claimed more than 5.3 million lives around the world.
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