A worker wearing a protective suit to help protect against COVID-19 stands outside an ambulance parked along a street in Beijing, Thursday, May 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) |
In its latest weekly assessment of the pandemic, the U.N.
health agency said there were more than 3.7 million new infections and 9,000
deaths in the last week, drops of 3% and 11% respectively. COVID-19 cases rose
in only two regions of the world: the Americas and the Western Pacific. Deaths
increased by 30% in the Middle East, but were stable or decreased everywhere
else.
WHO said it is tracking all omicron subvariants as “variants
of concern.” It noted that countries which had a significant wave of disease
caused by the omicron subvariant BA.2 appeared to be less affected by other
subvariants like BA.4 and BA.5, which were responsible for the latest surge of
disease in South Africa.
Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious diseases expert at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal, said it appeared that South Africa had passed its
most recent wave of COVID-19 caused by the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants; the
country has been on the forefront of the pandemic since first detecting the
omicron variant last November.
Karim predicted that another mutated version of omicron
might emerge in June, explaining that the large number of mutations in the
variant meant there were more opportunities for it to evolve.
Meanwhile in Beijing, authorities in the Chinese capital
ordered more workers and students to stay home and implemented additional mass
testing Monday as cases of COVID-19 continue to rise. Numerous residential
compounds in the city have restricted movement in and out, although lockdown
conditions remain far less severe than in Shanghai, where millions of citizens
have been under varying degrees of lockdown for two months.
China is vowing to stick to a “zero-COVID” policy despite
the fact that the WHO describes the policy as “unsustainable,” given the
infectious nature of omicron and its subvariants.
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