Omicron Less Severe But Not Mild: World Health Organisation Director-General Dr Tedros

The World Health Organisation director on Thursday said that the omicron variant of Covid-19 shouldn’t necessarily be categorised as “mild.”

While omicron appears to be less severe than the delta variant, especially among people who have been vaccinated, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that it does not mean it should be categorised as “mild”.

“Just like previous variants omicron is hospitalising people, and it’s killing people,” he said. “In fact the tsunami of cases is so huge and quick that it is overwhelming health systems around the world,” he added.

“Last week the highest number of Covid-19 cases were reported so far in the pandemic,” said Ghebreyesus. He said that the WHO was certain that figure was an underestimate, because of a backlog in testing around the year end holidays.

The WHO said on Thursday that a record 9.5 million cases of Covid-19 were tallied around the world last week, noting a 71% surge in the weekly count of infections amounting to a tsunami, as the new omicron variant sweeps worldwide.

The UN health agency in its weekly report on the pandemic said that the weekly count amounted to 95,20,488 new cases. However the number of recorded deaths declined with 41,178 recorded last week, compared to 44,680 in the week before that.

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