President Biden will call for a summit this week to discuss Covid-19 vaccination globally and counteract the effects of the Delta variant. PHOTO: Washington Post by Demetrius Freeman.
(c) 2021, The Washington Post – Katerina Ang
Delta is ‘by far’ the most dominant variant of the coronavirus in the world, a senior official at the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.
The global body lowered the range of its alerts on other variants of the virus after understanding how Delta was “winning the competition and replacing” all other variants.
“Less than 1% of the sequences we have available now are alpha, beta and gamma,” said Maria Van Kerhove, the covid-19 technical chief for the WHO, in a question-and-answer video, referring to the other variants that the organization considers “worrisome”.
“Of those variants that concern us, Delta is by far the most transmissible,” added Kerkhove. “If Delta is identified or begins to circulate in a country where it is already beta … [Delta] it has quickly replaced it ”.
The Delta variant has appeared in 185 countries, while global cases of coronavirus approach 230 million and deaths exceed 4.7 million since the pandemic began.
The Mu variant, which has been identified thousands of times in the United States and which had raised concerns about its greater resistance to vaccines over other variants, is also being replaced by Delta in every country where it is present, Van Kerkhove said. “Lambda and Mu don’t seem to be dominant.”
By the end of July, Delta had proven to be more powerful than all its rivals in the United States. The “coronavirus pandemic in the United States is a Delta pandemic,” the Washington Post reported in August, noting that the variant accounted for 93.4% of all new infections.
In the last four weeks, the Delta variant was seen in more than 98% of the coronavirus sequences supplied by the United States for the “Global Initiative for Infectious Data Dissemination,” a large global database of novel coronavirus genome sequences. .
Furthermore, on Tuesday, the WHO reclassified three other variants – Eta, Iota and Kappa – to “supervisory” status, stating that they “no longer pose a significant additional threat to global public health” as all of these variants are being superseded by Delta.
“They are not taking hold,” Van Kerkhove said.
Ahead of a summit on vaccination that President Biden is expected to propose on Wednesday, the World Health Organization also said that the number of global coronavirus deaths and infections had declined in recent weeks, reflecting increasing access. to vaccines in many rich countries and middle-income nations, while developing countries continue to try to immunize their populations to the best of their ability.
Mike Ryan, the WHO chief of emergencies, alerted at the same video event that previous declines had been followed by sharp rallies, though he said countries with high levels of immunization had less to worry about. “It is a sign that vaccines work,” he said.
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Author Information:
Katerina Ang is an editor on assignment in the Washington Post’s Seoul bureau. Before joining the Post in May 2021, she worked as an editor and reporter in New York and London for the Wall Street Journal and Vogue Business.
Read the original article here and the attached video on here.
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