The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Covid-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, on Wednesday, said the next Covid-19 variant is likely to be more transmissible than Omicron, but there’s no guarantee that the future strains will be milder, reported Mint.
“The next variant of concern will be more fit, and what we mean by that is it will be more transmissible because it will have to overtake what is currently circulating,” Van Kerkhove said during a live stream Q&A session across the WHO’s social media channels. “The big question is whether or not future variants will be more or less severe.”
The WHO official said that roughly 21 million Covid cases were reported over the last week, setting a new record for weekly cases from the rapidly spreading Omicron variant.
Van Kerkhove warned against assuming that the virus will become milder as it continues to mutate. She said global health officials are expected that future variants may also evade vaccine protection, which means vaccines may be less effective against them. She added that officials are still learning about the virus and don’t have a complete picture of its future trajectory.
The WHO’s Covid-19 lead stressed ramping up global vaccination coverage in order to slow the current spread and prevent the emergence of new variants. She said vaccines are preventing people from needing hospitalizations and preventing them from dying. She advised people to continue to follow public safety measures in the meantime.
Earlier this week, the WHO’s Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned not to assume that the COVID-19 pandemic is reaching its end game anytime soon as the world reported 100 coronavirus cases every three seconds on an average last week. He said it’s a fact that the world will be living with Covid-19 for the foreseeable future, and that people will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases.
