WHO points out that Covid variants could cause a serious impact on health systems
In recent weeks, there has been a 30% rise in Covid cases, largely due to the relaxation of the measures and the lack of monitoring and registration by the authorities.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it maintains the international emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in force since January 2020, despite the continued decline in deaths from this disease, which are no longer associated with specific rises in infections.
Despite this, the Emergency Committee for the pandemic, which meets every 3 months and did so on July 8 for the twelfth time, concluded that the pandemic “continues to constitute an extraordinary event that still has an adverse impact on global health. ”, underlined a WHO statement today.
WHO points out that Covid variants could cause a serious impact on health systems
The committee warned that the decline in tests in many countries, due to the proliferation of mild cases, is affecting the ability of experts to analyze the evolution of the coronavirus, despite the fact that “the appearance and spread of new variants could have negative impacts. even more serious health problems than the current ones”.
The experts who make up the committee, chaired by the French doctor Didier Houssin, lamented in this regard “the reduction in coverage and quality of surveillance”, which translates, among other things, into a lower shipment of genomic sequencing of cases of Covid in all regions.
“This prevents evaluating which variants of the virus are circulating, which means a lower ability to interpret trends in transmission and to adjust public health measures,” the experts said.
Even with this lesser control of the pandemic, in the last 2 weeks a 30% increase in Covid cases has been reported globally, mainly due to the BA.4 and BA.5 sublineages of the Omicron variant, he indicated. the committee.
The dynamics of Covid continue to be “unpredictable”, affirmed the members of the committee, who recommended maintaining measures to try to reduce the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
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They also suggested measures to recover previous levels of vigilance, which could include better integration into the national data of the results of the home tests that many citizens currently practice, replacing PCR tests or antigen tests.
The experts maintained the recommendation to vaccinate at least 70% of the national population to reduce severe cases and deaths, and advised helping countries that have not yet reached rates of 20% so that they can develop strategies to expand inoculations in their territories.
At the same time, they recommended that they follow the measures to reduce the spread of the virus in mass events, and other individual ones such as the use of masks, physical distancing or frequent hand hygiene, applied since the beginning of the health crisis two years ago. and a half.
Report with information from ElDiarioNy
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