The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned about the potential increase in the risk of COVID-19 due to the Delta variant virus asking nations to curb its spread.
The Organization said that the highly-transmissible variant which was first detected in India has now been found in 132 countries and territories.
WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan said that the Delta variant is evolving and “we need to move now before more dangerous variants emerge.”
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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO chief, added that as of now four variants of concern have emerged and more of them will get detected as long as the virus continues to spread. He said on average the infections have increased by 80 percent over the past four weeks in five of the six WHO regions.
Ryan said proven measures like physical distancing, wearing masks, hand hygiene, and avoiding long periods indoors in poorly ventilated and busy places still worked to bring transmission under control.
He said that these measures are stopping the Delta strain particularly after vaccination and “the virus has got fitter; the virus has got faster.” Ryan added that the “game plan” still works, but we need to implement and execute “our game plan much more efficiently and much more effectively than we’ve ever done before.”
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The UN health agency has called for vaccines to be distributed evenly around the world and has termed the drastic imbalance a “moral outrage.” Over four billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have now been administered globally and in countries categorized as high income by the World Bank, 98 doses per 100 people have been injected while the figure was 1.6 per 100 in the 29 lowest-income countries.
Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s frontman on the Covax scheme, said if the 4 billion doses had been administered equally to people aged over 60 it would have ensured two doses for everybody at the highest risk of severe consequences. (AW)
