The new variant ‘Omicron’ is continuing to spread rapidly across several countries and causing a global alarm. While a few countries have come up with travel bans, a few more have announced a slew of other precautionary measures.
Yesterday, WHO stated that the new COVID variant Omicron is less severe than Delta and is “highly unlikely” to fully dodge the vaccines against coronavirus, which gave a sigh of relief. “The preliminary data doesn’t indicate that this is more severe. In fact, if anything, the direction is towards less severity,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told.
He further said that as of now there were no signs that the existing COVID vaccines will fail against Omicron. It is believed that the world now has highly effective vaccines that have proved profound against all the variants so far.
So far, Omicron cases have been confirmed in at least nine African countries, including Botswana, Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. WHO designated the variant B.1.1.529 a variant of concern, named Omicron, on the advice of WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution (TAG-VE).