Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images
For: EFE
Saturday, November 2
Globally detected cases of Ómicron double in a week
The global genomic laboratories detected in the last week some 14, 000 new cases of coronavirus of the new Omicron variant , four times more than the approximately 3, 500 of the previous seven days, according to the Epidemiological report of the World Health Organization (WHO).
According to the analysis of the global network of laboratories GISAID , which collaborates with WHO, the percentage of detections of the Omicron variant in its sequences has risen from 0.1% a week ago to 1.6% today , although a large majority (96%) are still cases of the delta variant, dominant during 2021.
At analyze these numbers it should be taken into account that they add the analyzes of the last 60 days, so the actual percentage of Ómicron cases may be even higher , although on the other hand there is a special effort to detect the new variant and laboratories tend to sequence suspicious cases of it.
On the other hand, only a small part of covid cases – 19 (approximately one of each 40, as extracted from the WHO figures) are analyzed in the laboratory, so the data have a purely statistical value.
In any case, these data continue to confirm that Ómicron “has transmission advantages over Delta ”, which reached more than one 99% of the laboratory cases analyzed and for the past two weeks has ceded or terrain before the strain first detected in South Africa .
In its weekly epidemiological report, the WHO insists that there is still no data on whether Ómicron produces more or less severe cases of covid – 19 , although the increase in hospitalizations in countries where its presence is already very high, such as South Africa or the United Kingdom, confirms that it is a variant of the coronavirus capable of exerting worrying pressure on health systems.
The Geneva-based organization reiterates that preliminary data indicates a increased risk of Omicron infection among those vaccinated and people who have overcome the disease previously, so the risk associated with the new variant remains “very high” .
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