The World Health Organization, WHO has warned that the Covid-19 pandemic is far from over, as France, Germany, and Brazil posted new records of infections in the past 24 hours.
“This pandemic is nowhere near over,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
The highly transmissible Omicron strain has spread unabated around the world, pushing some governments to impose fresh measures while speeding up the rollout of vaccine booster shots.
Europe is at the epicentre of alarming new outbreaks, with Germany’s cases soaring past 100,000 and France reporting nearly half a million cases on Tuesday.
The UN health chief warned against dismissing Omicron as mild, as the dominant Covid strain continues to flare new outbreaks from Latin America to East Asia after it was first detected in southern Africa in November.
“Omicron may be less severe, on average, but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading,” he said.