The number of newly reported COVID-19 cases has dropped dramatically, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, urging the world to seize the opportunity to end the pandemic, AFP reported.
Newly reported cases of the disease, which has killed millions since being identified in late 2019, last week fell to the lowest level since March 2020, said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” he told reporters. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”
But the world needed to step up to “seize this opportunity”, he added.
Another new COVID variant is spreading – here’s what we know about omicron BA.4.6
BA.4.6, a subvariant of the omicron COVID variant which has been quickly gaining traction in the US, is now confirmed to be spreading in the UK.
The latest briefing document on COVID variants from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) noted that during the week beginning August 14, BA.4.6 accounted for 3.3 per cent of samples in the UK.
Mumbai: Work on Andheri bridge moves at snail’s pace leaves commuters angered
It has since grown to make up around 9 per cent of sequenced cases.
Similarly, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, BA.4.6 now accounts for more than 9 per cent of recent cases across the US. The variant has also been identified in several other countries around the world.
So what do we know about BA.4.6, and should we be worried? Let’s take a look at the information we have so far
BA.4.6 is a descendant of the BA.4 variant of omicron. BA.4 was first detected in January 2022 in South Africa and has since spread around the world alongside the BA.5 variant.
It is not entirely clear how BA.4.6 has emerged, but it’s possible it could be a recombinant variant. Recombination happens when two different variants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infect the same person, at the same time.
While BA.4.6 will be similar to BA.4 in many ways, it carries a mutation to the spike protein, a protein on the surface of the virus which allows it to enter our cells.
Delhi haunted by highest number of ‘ghost malls’, 1.14mn sq ft space lies empty in Mumbai
This mutation, R346T, has been seen in other variants and is associated with immune evasion, meaning it helps the virus to escape antibodies acquired from vaccination and prior infection.
Severity, infectiousness and immune evasion Fortunately, omicron infections generally cause less serious illness, and we’ve seen fewer deaths with omicron than with earlier variants. We would expect this to apply to BA.4.6 too. Indeed, there have been no reports yet that this variant is causing more severe symptoms.
But we also know that omicron subvariants tend to be more transmissible than previous variants.
BA.4.6 appears to be even better at evading the immune system than BA.5, the currently dominant variant. Although this information is based on a preprint (a study that is yet to be peer-reviewed), other emerging data supports this.
According to the UKHSA’s briefing, early estimates suggest BA.4.6 has a 6.55 per cent relative fitness advantage over BA.5 in England.
This indicates that BA.4.6 replicates more quickly in the early stages of infection and has a higher growth rate than BA.5.
The relative fitness advantage of BA.4.6 is considerably smaller than that of BA.5 over BA.2, which was 45 per cent to 55 per cent.
(With inputs from agencies)
DGCA resumes mandatory Breath Analyser Tests for all pilots, cabin crew after COVID-19 cases decline
