The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 90% of the world’s population currently has some immunity to COVID-19, although it warned of the threat of a new variant.
“The WHO estimates that at least 90% of the world’s population now has some level of immunity due to previous infection or vaccination,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we are not there yet,” he told a news conference.
Likewise, he expressed that the reduction of contagion surveillance is opening the door to a new variant of the virus, which can surpass the dominant one: Ómicron.
“Gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing and vaccination continue to create the perfect conditions for a worrisome new variant to emerge that could cause significant mortality,” he stressed.
Coronavirus: what is known about BA.2, the most contagious subvariant of Omicron?
Tedros recalled that last weekend it was one year since the WHO reported the existence of a new, more contagious variant: omicron.
Today there are more than 500 subvariants of Omicron, all of which are highly transmissible. They have mutations that allow them to evade immunity more easily, he recalled.
Countries have reported 6.6 million deaths from COVID-19 to WHO. Almost 640 million infections have also been registered. The UN agency insists that the data does not reflect the true number of victims.
Last week there were more than 8,500 deaths worldwide from COVID-19, Tedros recalled. A figure that “is not acceptable” after three years of the pandemic, when “we already have so many tools to prevent infections and save lives.”
