Covid, WHO: 'Within two months more than half of Europeans infected with Omicron'
WHO on Omicron in Europe: prediction based on study of current trend
WHO statement on Covid Omicron variant
“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Ihme) predicts that more than 50% of the Region’s population will be infected with Omicron within the next six to eight weeks.”
This was said by the director of WHO Europe, Hans Kluge, during an online press conference, adding that this variant can also affect “people who have been previously infected or vaccinated”.
WHO predictions, geneticist: ‘Imprecise data on Omicron, and now there is the Deltacron variant’
While the thresholds of occupancy of ordinary and intensive care beds are exceeded in two other regions, as a result of the exponential growth of cases of Covid that are attributed to the prevalence of the new variant Omicron, the professor of genetics of the Federico II in Naples, Massimo Zollo, explains what data are reasoning policy and health institutions, in this fourth wave of the epidemic from Sars-Cov-2.
Basically, we still don’t know much about Omicron, and the real extent to which it is spreading: ‘The estimation of Omicron is not certain with the ‘non S-sensitive’ approach, i.e. techniques such as gene amplification with quantitative detection.
Until all viruses isolated from swabs are sequenced and we have a firm definition, we cannot claim that the incidence is accurately measured, even if the NIH study is carried out in a sample of the population analysed’.
Zollo, who is also principal investigator at Ceinge-Advanced Biotechnologies and coordinator of the Covid-19 task force at the Naples-based centre, dwells on the data released by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, which shortly before Christmas had spoken of a prevalence of Omicron at 28% in Italy.
A number that many scholars, virologists and epidemiologists, say has been exceeded, even talking about 60%, but Italy does not have an advanced genotyping and phenotyping system for the Covid, the only way to track the real presence of this and other variants.
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