With known coronavirus cases rising significantly across the globe, continued Omicron evolution and increased pressure on public health systems, the World Health Organization on Tuesday said that the pandemic remains a public health emergency.<\/p>\n
The agency, which is part of the United Nations, first declared the coronavirus outbreaks a \u201cpublic health emergency of international concern\u201d on Jan. 30, 2020, nearly two and a half years ago.<\/p>\n
The decision to continue the global emergency status was based on several factors, including that \u201csurveillance has reduced significantly \u2014 including testing and sequencing \u2014 making it increasingly difficult to assess the impact of variants on transmission, disease characteristics and the effectiveness of countermeasures,\u201d according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O.<\/p>\n
The virus is running freely and countries are not effectively managing the disease burden based on their capacity, in terms of both hospitalization for acute cases and the expanding number of people with post-COVID-19 condition \u2014 often referred to as long Covid,\u201d he said at a news conference in Geneva.<\/p>\n
As of Monday, an average of more than 930,000 newly confirmed virus cases are being reported globally each day, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. That is a 37 percent rise over the last two weeks. In the same period, there has been an average of more than 1,700 deaths, an 18 percent increase, Johns Hopkins data shows.<\/p>\n
The reported cases are considered a significant undercount of the true infection rate, as the W.H.O. noted, because testing and tracking have been curtailed. There is waning immunity in the wealthy nations that have had access to vaccines for about one and half years, though the vaccines remain highly protective against the worst outcomes.<\/p>\n
In addition, countries like the United States have been throwing out vaccine doses, while not even two-thirds of the world population is fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n
Those vaccines, while valuable, have become dated. U.S. regulators committed last week to updating the 2020 vaccine recipes for this fall\u2019s booster campaign with new formulas meant to defend against the ultra-contagious Omicron subvariants.<\/p>\n
Those rapidly spreading subvariants, known as BA.4 and BA.5, are driving a summertime surge of the coronavirus in Europe, health officials say. BA.5 is dominant among new cases in the United States, where rising test positivity rates suggest that many places around the country are experiencing new outbreaks of infections.<\/p>\n
As of the week ending Saturday, BA.5 made up 65 percent of new cases in the United States and BA.4 made up 16 percent, according to estimates released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Combined, the two subvariants accounted for about 52 percent of new cases only two weeks ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reporting of BA.5 is increasing in terms of the reports, and has increased substantially over the last four weeks alone,\u201d said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the W.H.O.\u2019s Covid-19 technical lead. \u201cWe expect that trend to continue around the world, but we will continue to assess this as we go forward. We need more data to be able to do that \u2014 to look again at transmissibility and escape severity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The W.H.O.\u2019s emergency committee convened virtually on Friday to assess the course of the pandemic, and decided it continued to meet the criteria of a health emergency.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a major disconnect in COVID-19 risk perception between scientific communities, political leaders and the general public,\u201d Dr. Tedros said on Tuesday. \u201cCovid-19 is nowhere near over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With known coronavirus cases rising significantly across the globe, continued Omicron evolution and increased pressure on public health systems, the World Health Organization on Tuesday said that the pandemic remains…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":94652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n