New COVID variant could emerge amid drop in surveillance, vaccination, WHO warns
over, but a growing decline in surveillance and vaccination could open the door to a new variant of concern, says the World Health Organization .
And while Omicron tends to cause less severe disease than previous variants, the virus’ uncanny ability to mutate in ways that allow it to escape immunity, either from vaccination or infection, means COVID-19 remains an ongoing threat, Tedros said. For the last several months, WHO officials have been urging countries to beef up tracking, testing and sequencing of COVID-19, following a marked decline in surveillance measures as public health restrictions have been relaxed worldwide.WHO has also added caveats to its weekly epidemiological reports on global COVID-19 circulation and case numbers, noting that any trends “should be interpreted with due consideration of the limitations of the COVID-19 surveillance systems.
To highlight this, Van Kerkhove said Friday that while there were at least 2.5 million cases of COVID-19 globally reported to WHO over the last week, this number is a “gross underestimate of the circulation of this virus around the world.““There are some wastewater estimates suggesting that number could be as much as five times higher in some countries,” she said.
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