December 3, 2021
15:33
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has said it has not received any reports of deaths from the new strain of the virus, Omicron, AFP reported.
Everything on the topic:
Omicron – the new coronavirus variant 111
–The health organization is gathering evidence of the potentially feared option as countries around the world struggle to stop it from spreading.
But despite the growing number of countries registering infections with the new version, no deaths have yet been reported to the UN Health Agency.
“I have not yet seen any reports of Omicron-related deaths,” said WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier in Geneva.
Lindmeier called on people to be wary of the Delta variant, which accounts for 99.8% of the sequences uploaded to the global GISAID scientific initiative with samples collected over the past 60 days.
The WHO said it would take several weeks to get a full picture of the transmission and severity of the disease with the Omicron strain, as well as to assess how vaccines, tests and treatment are coping with the new version.
With the spread of Omicron from different countries, separate data appear. Preliminary data show that there is a higher transmittance.
Vaccine manufacturers will most likely have to modify their preparations against the new variant of the coronavirus – Omicron, the WHO announced, BNR reported.
A spokesman for the organization, Christian Lindmeier, advised pharmaceutical companies to start working in this direction now, rather than waiting for the last minute.
The executive director of the German company Bayontech (BioNTech) Ugur Sahin said that the company can very quickly rework its product to counteract the Omicron option.
“New variants appear within a few weeks or months. If we develop a new vaccine, we cannot prevent the first wave of infections because we need about 100 days to process the vaccine and distribute it,” Shahin said.
