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.
An Emirates flight from Dubai arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday afternoon, the first service of the airline since the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Saturday. Flight EK366 took off from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at 3:51am yesterday and landed at 4:02pm before taxiing to the airport’s D6 gate at Terminal 2 at 4:08pm, data from the airport and FlightAware, a global flight tracking site, showed. Of the 501 passengers on the flight, 275 were Taiwanese, including 96 group tour travelers, the data showed. Tourism Administration Deputy Director-General Huang He-ting (黃荷婷) greeted Taiwanese passengers at the airport and
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
One person was killed and another seven injured today when a tourist shuttle bus plunged 30m to 40m down a ravine in Nantou County, the Tourism Administration said. The bus is suspected to have suddenly accelerated out of control near the flower center of the Sun-Link-Sea Forest Recreation Area, a popular attraction during cherry blossom season. Of the eight onboard, a 66-year-old man was killed, four were seriously injured and three sustained minor injuries, including the driver. The Nantou County Police Department said it received a report of the incident at 12:15pm and dispatched seven teams to assist. All surviving passengers have been transferred
RSS