London: The EG.5 coronavirus strain that is circulating in China and the United States was labelled a "variant of interest" by the World Health Organisation on Wednesday, but it did not appear to pose a greater threat to public health than other variants.
With an estimated more than 17% of cases, the fast-spreading variant is the one that has caused an increase in the virus not only in the United States but also in China, South Korea, Japan, and Canada, among other nations.
In a risk assessment, the WHO stated that the evidence "taken together does not suggest that EG.5 has additional public health risks relative to the other currently circulating omicron descendent lineages."
It went on to say that the risk posed by EG.5 required a more thorough analysis. Since the virus's emergence, COVID-19 has caused the deaths of more than 6.9 million people worldwide and more than 768 million confirmed cases. In March 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic, and COVID-19's global emergency status was lifted in May of this year.
The WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, stated that although EG.5 was more transmissible than other omicron variants, it was not more severe.
In comparison to other sublineages of omicron that have been in circulation since late 2021, "we don't detect a change in severity of EG.5", she said.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general, lamented the fact that many nations failed to provide WHO with COVID-19 data. Only 11% of hospital and ICU admissions related to the virus, according to him, were reported.
In response, WHO released a set of COVID standing recommendations in which it urged nations to continue providing vaccination and reporting COVID data, particularly mortality and morbidity data. According to Van Kerkhove, efforts to combat the virus are being hampered by the lack of data from numerous nations.
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She claimed that "about a year ago, we were in a much better position to either act or be more agile." "And now the time it takes for us to do that is getting longer. And this is something we are getting worse at."