WHO Urges Global Vigilance Against Covid Variants Amid Evolving Threat

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom, has encouraged all countries to “strengthen the supervision of Covid-19” and “continue to implement the recommendations to save lives” in the presence of the new variants of Omicron EG.5 and BA.2.86.

This was expressed in a press conference held this Friday in which he stressed that the covid “continues to be a global health threat”.

Although the WHO currently has less data on the incidence in the different countries because they have stopped collecting it, so “there has been an increase in hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths in some countries.”

In this sense, it has called on all countries to continue reporting on their covid situation so that “they can advise them on the risk of new variants.”

For her part, the WHO technical lead for covid, Dr. Maria Van Kerhove, explained that “the virus continues to evolve because there are a number of variants in circulation, all of them from Ómicron.”

“Surveillance is really important”

“Surveillance is really important so that we can follow trends,” he declared, assuring that “they only have hospitalization data from 19 countries”.

“Surveillance is important not only to track variants, but also to let individuals know if they are infected or not,” added Dr. Kerhove.

Thus, he explained that the new variant BA.2.86, commonly known as ‘Pirola’, “has more than 30 mutations in the spike protein, although only nine or ten cases of this variant have been detected so far”.

For this reason, it has been classified as “under monitoring” while waiting for more cases to be found and its biology to be further explored.

In this sense, the expert has affirmed that “the virus presents a threat because it is evolving and changing and it is not possible to predict with certainty what those changes will mean”.

“Large numbers of people are being reinfected, there has been an increase in hospitalizations in the last month, in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, where we are in summer.

This is not to be expected if we think of a respiratory pathogen such as influenza, which usually peaks in the winter months in temperate regions of the planet.. And this worries us because the world has opened up,” said the doctor.

Finally, the expert concluded by warning that “governments must remain vigilant in the face of covid because the threat has not disappeared.”