GENEVA (AFP) – The World Health Organisation (WHO) voiced alarm on Wednesday (March 16) that registered Covid-19 instances are as soon as once more rising globally, regardless of testing ranges having dropped considerably.
After falling for weeks, reported Covid-19 instances rose globally by 8 per cent final week, with greater than 11 million instances and over 43,000 new deaths registered, WHO mentioned.
And within the Western Pacific area, new instances shot up final week by a full 29 per cent.
Case numbers within the area have been rising because the finish of December and the Western Pacific has now overtaken Europe as the worldwide hotspot for detected new instances, with 5.02 million, in comparison with 4.99 million in Europe.
Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, lamented the worldwide improve, telling a information convention that it got here “despite a significant reduction in testing that’s occurring worldwide”.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus agreed, warning that the shortage of visibility as a consequence of lowered testing meant “the cases we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg.”
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“And we know that when cases increase, so do deaths,” he mentioned, highlighting “unacceptably high levels of mortality in many countries, especially where vaccination levels are low among susceptible populations”.
“We call on all countries to remain vigilant,” he mentioned, stressing “the pandemic is not over”.
More than two years into the pandemic, which has formally claimed greater than six million deaths – with the true determine believed to be a number of occasions as excessive – the resurgence in reported instances is because of a “combination of factors”, Dr Van Kerkhove mentioned.
She highlighted that the Omicron variant was nonetheless spreading “at a very intense level around the world”.
One of the sub-lineages of that variant, the BA.2, is especially transmissible and is now by far essentially the most prevalent in samples collected and sequenced.
“This is the most transmissible variant we have seen of the Sars-CoV-2 virus to date,” she mentioned.
