As cases of the coronavirus rise throughout the world and in India, particularly driven by the Omicron variant in Western countries, the World Health organization said that a weekly high of 9.5 million cases has been recorded worldwide. The health body has termed this as a “tsunami” of cases and said that it underrepresents the total case count due to a backlog in testing over the holiday season. There have been 41,178 deaths recorded in the past week worldwide.
In a weeklybrieifing that lasted over 1 hour, WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “Last week, the highest number of COVID-19 cases were reported so far in the pandemic”.
Media briefing on #COVID19 with @DrTedros https://t.co/UPBPyB2oAe
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 6, 2022
But the number of deaths have come down as well. Against the 41,178 deaths recorded in the past week, there were 44,680 in the week before that.
The WHO also stated that the Omicron variant should not be termed as “mild” even if its virulence is lesser than that of the Delta strain. Dr. Ghebreyesus warned that “just like previous variants, Omicron is hospitalising people, and it’s killing people”. He also said that the rising number of cases around the world are overwhelming healthcare systems.
WHO emergencies chief, Michael Ryan, said that any speculation that oicron is the last variant of the coronavirus pandemic was “wishful thinking” and that “there is a lot of energy in this virus”.
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